Blackout poetry workshops to promote youth literacy

This workshop was developed to promote youth literacy through an interactive poetry-building activity. A total of four workshops was held for students ranging from 4th grade to high school, as part of InsideOut Literary Art Project's Youth Writers Conference, Walt Whitman Elementary's "March is Reading" month, and The Baldwin Center.

Category: creative writing; writing pedagogy

Attributes: workshop design; assignment design; writing assessment

Target Audience: K-12 students

Client: InsideOut's Youth Writers Conference, Walt Whitman Elementary, The Baldwin Center

Year: 2019-2020

Analyze and Design

Example of a blackout poem

According to Michigan’s standardized test M-Step, only 44% of third-graders across the state were proficient in English language arts in 2016-2017. That’s a dip from 46% in 2015-16, and a further dip from 50% in 2014-15.

To combat this and encourage literacy in Michigan's youth, I collaborated with local organizations and schools in Detroit and nearby Pontiac to run a number of poetry workshops for students. Specifically, I workshopped with 4th and 5th graders at Walt Whitman Elementary School in Pontiac; Detroit high schoolers as part of the Youth Writers Conference, put on by a Detroit-based organization called the InsideOut Literary Arts Project; and 6th-8th graders during a summer camp held by The Baldwin Center, a community center in Pontiac.

Specifically, the workshops focused on "blackout poetry," which is a style of poetry that remixes the works of others in order to create original writing. Using a pre-existing page of text as a canvas, writers use markers to black out certain sections of the page, leaving behind specific words or phrases that, when read together, take on a whole new meaning. The fact that all of the words in a blackout poem must come from an existing text poses a unique challenge. While this style may seem to limit a poet's vocabulary, it actually pushes them to use words they might have never considered using otherwise.

Development and Implementation

In preparation for the workshops, I first had to find source texts that would be appropriate and engaging for a young audience. I knew that for elementary and middle school students, I needed to find source texts that matched their reading level and more importantly, came from something that they might already be familiar with. Therefore, I specifically picked excerpts from classic books that I thought students have encountered before, such as Charlotte’s Web, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and selected works from Shel Silverstein.

In working with Detroit high school students, I used source texts that were a bit more mature but would still resonate with teenagers. I ended up using excerpts from speeches, songs, and quotes that spoke of Detroit or were originally written by Detroit natives. For example, I used an excerpt from a Barack Obama speech when he visited the city in 2016. Another excerpt from an article titled “Seeds of Change,” written by Detroit-based activist Grace Lee Boggs.

Another important detail regarding the source text selection process was that they had to capture a diverse range of words. While it was enticing to use passages that had a lot of unique and interesting vocabulary, the source text also needed to have enough pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions. Otherwise, it would be a challenge for students to find and form intelligible sentences for their eventual poems.

Most of the students that I worked with had never heard of blackout poetry before so there needed to be some setup. To introduce them to the genre, I first held up a sample blackout poem and told them “This is a poem. But it doesn’t look like poems that we typically see. What is different about it?”

Once students understood the structure and aesthetic of the genre, I gave them five tips to remember as they worked (seen here). As you can see, I emphasized reading instead of writing in these tips, especially in the first three. For me, it was important that students comprehended the words and vocabulary of the source texts before they began crossing things out.

After that, I took a hands-off approach to the workshop. I let students work however they wished and only provided feedback and suggestions if a student asked for it.

Examples of blackout poems created by students

Evaluation and Takeaways

I had two main takeaways after running these workshops. First, the multimodality of the blackout poetry genre seemed to engage students more than traditional poetry. Students seemed eager, sometimes too eager, to jump right in and start blacking out words. This was vastly different from other experiences I have had with students at the beginning of a writing project, often telling me “I don’t know what to write.” By providing students with the text and framing the activity as “looking” and “searching” for a poem rather than writing one from scratch, it helped to ease certain anxieties about writing that some students may have had.

As an activity, I would also argue blackout poetry emphasizes the act of reading more than the act of writing. It is first and foremost a tool to help students read critically, which is interesting as we often think about poetry workshops as something that focuses on writing.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse