Poetry Friday: Blackout Poetry

I haven't written about our Friday writing group for such a long time. Ramona and I, and two of her friends are still meeting every week; I guess I just haven't been writing about writing. (Let's face it, "writing" here at the blog has suffered immeasurably in the last couple of years. I'd love to remedy that and occasionally share something other than a Poetry Friday post, though I'm grateful for the way Poetry Friday keeps me hanging in there, blog-wise.)

Anyway.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave the girls a Blackout Poetry assignment. What is Blackout Poetry? Here are loads of great examples from Austin Kleon. He used newspaper articles, but you can use any text.


For our project, I pulled an idea from this Pinterest page (thank you, Racheal.) We used this passage:

(and here's what someone else did with it) from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Of course, it's always a good idea to credit the source of your blackout poem. Copyright, copyright, copyright, people!

We drew an idea from our aptly named Idea Jar:

Our inspiration: Springtime. (And oh, am I feeling inspired about spring after the frigid temps of the last couple of days!)

Here's what I came up with for my "illustrated" blackout poem:

Here's the text I highlighted/kept: 

Feel it. 

Something soft, 

branches of trees. 

A light ahead, 

but a long way off. 

A moment. 

A wood at night, 

the air. 

Dark tree-trunks, 

open doorway. 

Daylight. 

Walk forward

through the wood, 

towards the other light. 

A pitter-patter, 

coming 

among the trees

soon after. 

~ Karen Edmisten 

If I get permission from the girls, I'll share their creations here, too. (It's just not as simple as it was when they were eight years old and every smashingly cute word out of their mouths was blog fodder. Sigh.) 

~~~~~

The lovely Linda B. has the Poetry Friday round-up today at Teacher Dance. 

For more about Poetry Friday, go here.