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What is Blackout Poetry? Examples and Inspiration
Sean Glatch  | September 19, 2025  | 27 Comments
If you struggle to find the right words, why not start with somebody else’s? Such is the philosophy behind blackout poetry, a recent artistic and literary phenomenon that has blossomed in the past decade.
What is blackout poetry? Chances are, you have already seen blackout poetry in action: maybe it’s shown up on your social media timeline, or maybe you’ve read The New York Times’ Searching for Poetry series. Blackout poetry pages are easy to create, share, and celebrate, so it’s no wonder that their prominence coincided with the rise of social media.
The internet is populated with blackout poetry examples, and we’d like to share some of our favorites—while also explaining how to do blackout poetry. Let’s explore this artsy and inventive poetry form.
What is Blackout Poetry: Contents
What is Blackout Poetry? A Brief History of the Form
Blackout Poetry Examples and Analysis
How to Do Blackout Poetry: A Step-by-Step Approach
Where Can I Share My Blackout Poetry Pages?
What is Blackout Poetry? A Brief History of the Form
Like most things in literature, blackout poetry—also known as erasure poetry, redacted poetry, and a form of found poetry—has a complex history.
In fact, the earliest known blackout poetry examples hail from Benjamin Franklin’s days. Ben’s neighbor, Caleb Whiteford, would publish redacted versions of the paper, using puns flowing across the text to create new meaning in the pages. You can learn more about Whiteford in this TEDxKC talk with Austin Kleon.
Now, Whiteford was ahead of his time. This creative play with physical text would not resurface until the Dada movement (1915-1925), in which artists expressed surreal, absurd, and existential thoughts through the interplay of words and images. This interplay, commonly known as collaging, reignited a love for the physical play with language, encouraging poets to experiment with form and language simultaneously.
The Dadaists, the Beat Poets, and other 20th century movements continued to explore and expand the form, but blackout poetry earned its greatest support from Austin Kleon at The New York Times. In 2010, Austin Kleon published his collection Newspaper Blackout; an instant bestseller, Newspaper Blackout (alongside Kleon’s Tumblr and Instagram presence) put blackout poetry pages in front of every writer’s screen.
From the New York Times’ interactive generator to Outrun the Stigma’s erasure poetry community project, blackout poetry continues to enjoy its digital popularity.
Before we dive into how to do blackout poetry, let’s look at and examine some blackout poetry examples, including the original texts those poems used.
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Blackout Poetry Examples and Analysis
Great blackout poetry can be short or long, abstract or concrete, linear or lateral. There’s only one rule of the form: have fun making it!
Well-crafted blackout poetry pages give new meanings to old texts, and the interplay of those texts often creates new and surprising meanings. Here are three poems that accomplish that goal.
Note: the third poem is an example of erasure poetry, not blackout poetry, but we include this in our examples list as the two forms accomplish something similar.
1. Blackout Poetry by Tyler Knott Gregson
“In my solitude
I became aware of
lack.
Lie near me
in the starlight, quiet
and free.
A faint noise
of people passing in
sleeping cities
after hours of stillness.
There is romance
in the black
hours.”
Source Text: Travels with a Donkey in the Cevénnes by Robert Louis Stevenson (Chapter 10).
Analysis: There’s a wonderful simplicity to this blackout poem. It’s central images are starlight, sleeping cities, and the night; these images build upon each other a romantic...