Blackout Poetry, or Erasure Poetry, involves taking a segment of complete work and removing a limited amount of words to create a new poem. A Blackout basically takes a Sharpie to a printed work, leaving behind a series of words or characters to make something new. I tried this with a preface page from Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. I copied an image and added black rectangles in Paint to reverse highlight the words I wanted–it was a surprisingly creative experience! I can see these being really meaningful if the new edit somehow references the meaning of the original text.

The final text reads “Preface: time laughs at Fate | your World was found | human and beautiful it grows”