Blackout Poetry 2

See previous post. Pages from paperback book that was already falling apart, black colored pencil, black crayon.

My shortest iTunes playlist

Books
-"B*tches in Bookshops" by Annabelle Quezada & La Shea Delaney [better than the original (Jay-Z & Kanye West's N****s in Paris) imho. Lyrics at the above link]

-"Book People Unite" by The Roots & friends for Reading is Fundamental

Blackout Poetry

A popular thing to do on Tumblr is to make blackout poetry from single pages of books by blacking out with a marker or something all the words except for the ones you want to have, thus creating a poem from existent text. Book lovers often decry this as needless destroying of books. I kinda agree with them, but the result is often quite beautiful. Some of my favorite poems are blackout poetry. I think as long as they're old books that are going to be destroyed or thrown away anyway it's ok, but people shouldn't do that to perfectly good books. It's probably best not to think about where the sausage comes from. Anyway, I rediscovered a copy of That Hideous Strength that I had bought for like a quarter at a yard sale but had to replace with a similarly priced copy (with the same cover, of course) because the first 86 pages are missing and the rest are starting to fall out. It is an old book, from the seventies, and paperbacks are not very long-lived, especially if they are read a lot. I didn't have the heart to recycle it as I love C.S. Lewis and that is one of my favorite books, and I thought maybe I could make some book craft with the pages (the cover is this garish hideous '70s sci-fi thing that doesn't lend itself to lovingly created book art simply because it is too ugly). I wasn't quite sure what until I discovered blackout poetry. I decided to try my hand on it with the first remaining page.

Page from a paperback book, black colored pencil, black crayon

This one is actually three short poems since I couldn't think of a longer one. lol They are not connected. They read as follows:

the pale edges of

silence

seemed to be calling

~

the anachronism

met

the person in

her

~

things read and wrote 

were the substance;

to write

and

believe in the reality of

things not seen.

I'm kind of proud of it. The second one (the other side of the page) isn't quite as good, but I still like it, although my coloring job was like a million times more sloppy. Hazards include tearing the page and accidentally coloring over the word I wanted to keep.

Page from a paperback book, black crayon

 

This one is one poem. It's way less colored in/neatly since I was afraid the page might tear if I used the black colored pencil on both sides, so I just used black crayon. Poem is as follows:

a place

of

sunlight,–

of laughter and

wonder

and

better things

Not bad for my first try at it. I've already tried to do the next page but so far I'm not seeing anything. I could have been distracted by the Christmas music I'm listening to.