Room 16 Blackout Poetry

By Kylie M | Posted: Tuesday November 28, 2023

In the last few weeks, Room 16 have been working on their very own blackout poetry masterpieces.

Blackout poetry is where you rip out a page from a book, find an anchor word, circle fitting words you like to create a poem, then blackout the rest of the page in colour pencil or black vivid. Usually an image is created in the background too.

The process went from finding the perfect piece of paper (taking days for some), looking for a string of words that create a nice flowing poem, then drawing an outline for the background images. Once this was checked off by the teacher, we got creative and began designing our final poems. Our teacher then hung them on our wall, making a neat display of our work.

The poem themes range from humorous, natural themed, weapon themed and ones with deep meanings.

Here’s an example by Salem, “spinning, skittering, screaming, I burn, I fly, and still.” (See image attached)

And an example by Peyton, “mouth shut, listen. Ask depression, who lied? Him, get it, that’s why, had to, happened, night, fix.” (See image attached)

Phoebe reports that, “some poetry piece outcomes were better than others,” and Paige says that, “it was alright but the book we used for it was challenging.”

Article by Alexis, Peyton and Salem.

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