On Ethical ELA this week, host Dave Wooley invited VerseLove participants to compose blackout poems: “Find a piece of writing that you want to use as a source, grab a black sharpie and start redacting. The words that are left will be your poem.”

Basically, a blackout is a found poem, with chosen words and phrases remaining in original order. Examples can be found here: How-To Blackout Poetry.

Great! I thought. This will be easy.

It was not.

The problem: First thing that came to mind was a new poem that completely awes me…

Amy Nemecek, The Language of the Birds, 2022.

I started blacking out lines and stopped, because a thing happened.

I just couldn’t reduce this stunning poem. It felt like…desecration.

Instead, I lifted a few words out that especially sang to me. They brought with them their own images, forming something new and other.

Thus was my “found-story haiku” born (not sure if that’s even a thing… I guess it is now):

History of Ideas

from firelight, a spark
illumination flaring
then dying in dust

from the river, song
improvisational joy
free and beckoning

from the silhouette
of trees against starlit sky
infinite longing

from the heart crying
against its impermanence
a reliquary

from calloused fingers
a hieroglyph on a wall
before papyrus

from the weightless bones
a shell of structure is formed
the embryo stirs

out of the static
spark, song, longing are harnessed
the fragile thing lives

For the record: I finished blacking to reveal the words I pulled, although this in itself is not a blackout poem.

It is my seed-bed of ideas.