Black out a poem

Blackout poetry starts with a page that already exists. You read it, choose a few words, and cover everything else with a thick black marker. The words that survive, in the order they appear on the page, become the poem.

Austin Kleon made the technique popular with his newspaper blackouts. I first tried it years ago at a writing school, and it stayed with me. When I bring poetry to a workshop, as a facilitator, I usually arrive with a bag of physical books and newspapers: old books that libraries give away, today's papers, a marker for everyone. But sometimes the workshop is online, and there is no paper to share. For those moments I made this small tool. It is a shorter version of the real thing, but it works well to get past the blank page and find the start of a poem.