Blackout poetry hides a poem inside someone else's words. Paste any text, or start from one of the 201 public-domain poems in our anthology, then click the words you want to keep. Everything else is blacked out, and the finished piece downloads as a PNG you can print or post.
Everything runs in your browser. The text you paste is never uploaded, and the PNG is drawn on your own device.
What blackout poetry is
Blackout poetry, also called erasure or redacted poetry, takes an existing text and obscures most of it so the words left visible form a new poem. The classic material is a newspaper page and a marker, and the form runs on constraint: you cannot add a single word, only choose from what the source already says. Ourtypes of poemsreference files it alongside the other found-poetry forms.
How to make a good one
Scan before you choose. Read the whole passage once without clicking, and let a phrase catch your eye. That phrase is usually the poem's spine.
Keep fewer words than feels safe. Most first attempts keep twice too many. A blackout poem of eight words can carry more than one of forty.
Respect the reading order. The kept words are read left to right, top to bottom, exactly as they sit in the source. If the sentence you want needs a word from an earlier line, start again from that line.
Let the source fight you. The pleasure of the form is finding tenderness in a tax notice or menace in a recipe. Starting from a poem that is already beautiful is playing on easy mode, which is also allowed.
Public-domain sources to raid
Copyright matters here: the text you black out is still someone's text. Every poem in the picker above is in the public domain, so you can publish what you make from them freely. Your own drafts are yours to redact too, and an old chapter that never worked often hides a poem that does. If you enjoy working under constraint, theconcrete poem makerapplies a different one: shape instead of erasure.
Save what you find
The save button keeps your chosen words in your Writer's Toolkit, on this device, so you can come back and rework the poem later. The PNG is the finished artifact; the saved word list is the draft.
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