University of Nebraska - Lincoln
DigitalCommons@University of Nebraska - Lincoln
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Engaging Honors Students through Newspaper
Blackout Poetry
Melissa Ladenheim
University of Maine - Main#)'//"#+&#'*1*'0*'+##"1
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45
2014
Engaging Honors Students
through Newspaper
Blackout Poetry
ME l i s s a la d E n h E i M
un i v E r s i t y o f Ma i n E
T
he frustration in the classroom was palpable and familiar. We were reading
Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho’s poetry, If Not, Winter: Fragments of
Sappho, in the rst semester of our Honors Civilizations sequence. The students
balked at the absence of text, the lack of a story line, a missing hero, the paucity
of biographical information on Sappho, the seeming waste of paper where only
one word appeared on a page, and the whole idea of poetry. Poetry was not their
thing, some claimed, when asked if this genre appealed to them. Even to honors
educators who have the privilege of teaching bright, curious, and engaged stu-
dents, this assertion is all too familiar. The challenge is to convince students
otherwise: to demonstrate pedagogically that poetry can be their thing and also
to show them how much it can shape the way they think about the world and
their place in it.
The funny thing is that, just minutes before the students started complaining
about reading Sappho’s poetry, most of them had removed ear buds and turned
off any number of electronic devices streaming sound, mostly music. They did
not yet see a connection between Sappho’s lyrical poetry and the lyrics of the
songs they had just been listening to. Making that connection for them opened
the door for critical understandings of Sappho’s work, its evocative imagery, and
its ability to give voice to the same deep and confounding feelings of love and
desire that the students were experiencing.
At the same time, even as students were shown Sappho’s legacy as a lyric
poet—for example, the connection between Sappho’s seventh-century BCE “you
burn me” (Carson 77) and Peggy Lee’s twentieth-century Fever (Moxley)—they
retained a general sense of alienation from the text every time I taught it. In
2009, a student in one of my classes offered a solution: perhaps everyone in
the class could try creating love poems themselves using a technique known as
“newspaper blackout.”
Austin Kleon claims in his introduction to Newspaper Blackout (2010) that
“petty crime, writer’s block and the Internet” gave rise to this technique of creat-
ing poetry. A stack of newspapers brimming with words, a writer’s inability to
string together his own, and a permanent marker led Kleon to the discovery of
poems waiting to be revealed in the columns of print ranging from headline
HONORS IN PRACTICE, VOL. 10 (2014)
Copyright 2013 by the National Collegiate Honors Council
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stories to sports pages. The technique is like a wood carving where the excess
wood is removed to reveal the object hidden inside. A wood carver I knew
claimed, “You have to throw away what doesn’t belong to it. And then you have
the bird” (Ladenheim 19). Kleon describes the process likewise with newspaper
blackout poems:
What’s exciting about the poems is that by destroying writing you
can create new writing. You can take a stranger’s random words
and pick and choose from them to express your own personal
vision. (xv)
At its most basic, newspaper blackout poetry involves crossing out the words
you do not want. Any newspaper article will work as, in fact, will any piece
of writing. The point is that you have only the words, letters, punctuation, and
spaces in the chosen piece to work with.
With the selected newspaper article, a permanent marker, and a charge to
create a poem on love, with no particular kind of love specied, students went
to work. The results were a range of poems with a range of quality. More impor-
tantly, though, what emerged from the exercise was a pattern in the words chosen
by the students: a kind of language of love that was not necessarily Sappho’s lan-
guage of violets, honey, and apples but nonetheless patterned evocations of the
same experiences she struggled to articulate. Students understood that the words
they had chosen embodied and reected the feelings they were trying to capture
in their poems, and they consequently became more attentive to Sappho’s use of
language in hers. They also became conscious of what the poems looked like on
the page and to the spaces between the words and phrases, both the black ones
in their poems (see Figure 1) and the blank ones in Sappho’s, seeing them less
as absence and more as potential. Rather than continuing to castigate Carson’s
efforts to privilege all the words Sappho spoke (as she repeatedly gives a single
word or two its own page) as a waste of paper, students began to wonder what
might have been there before time and fear ravaged the texts.
To say that the exercise made poets out of all the students would be an exag-
geration, but I can claim, based on both their poems and their reections on the
experience, that it provided them a novel way of thinking about Sappho’s work
as well as their own. The exercise was challenging, but students also described
it as “intriguing”; it allowed them entry into the poet’s struggle to capture the
transcendent in the mundane of language. While they still did not know much
of Sappho’s biography—was she married? a mother? a lesbian?—they did come
to know Sappho better as a poet. One student, herself a poet, reected both on
her experience creating the newspaper blackout poem and on Sappho: “It made
me appreciate that my poetry is not decayed or burnt largely out of existence,
and it made me wonder whether Sappho would have welcomed new interpreta-
tions of her work as a result of fragmenting, or if she would experience the same
frustration I do.” Another student commented, “Although writing the blackout
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Figure 1. Example of a Newspaper Blackout Poem Created by Elizabeth Wood
in November 2012 from an article by Chris Talbott in the Bangor
Daily News on October 19, 2009
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poetry was difcult, I denitely learned a great deal more about the works we
have read by writing them.”
Transcription of the newspaper blackout poem in Figure 1:
fascinating
requires patience
a
self-
inicted crisis
he
doesn’t seem to know what
makes him
him,
he doesn’t seem to have
any answers.
It takes patience
to see
fabulous in and out
vivid but unexplainable hardly drawn at all
life is beautifully layered
after all
what can ‘pretty’
explain?
The lines “he doesn’t seem to have / any answers, / It takes patience” draw
attention to a larger dynamic in the honors classroom in which Sappho has been
taught as part of a great books curriculum. Approximately half of the incom-
ing class in any given year is made up of students enrolled in the College of
Engineering and College of Natural Sciences, Forestry, and Agriculture, students
who are generally accustomed to and comfortable with more concrete ways of
approaching knowledge and nding answers. In no way am I saying that any one
discipline has a particular claim on poetry or on unpacking its mysteries, but I do
see different kinds of expertise and academic comfort zones among the students
gathered around the table in honors, students for whom answers are an expected
outcome of their work. These kind of experiences in honors can provide them an
alternative model for thinking about questions that do not necessarily have an
answer, however patient they may be.
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Further, what characterizes the experience of all the students in our Honors
Civilizations sequence is the pace at which we move through the curriculum. In
the rst semester alone, we cover several thousand years of Western civilization
from ancient Sumer to ancient Greece, with only two or maybe three classes
allotted to each representative text. Finding creative ways to make these texts
more accessible and immediate can facilitate the students’ engagement with
them and enhance what they take away from the readings. In my experience,
using newspaper blackout poetry as an entrée to Sappho specically and poetry
(and prose) more generally has substantially enhanced student engagement with
the texts.
An honors seminar creates the space for an interdisciplinary group of stu-
dents to engage in activities such as blackout poetry that challenge them to
confront the unknown and give them the skills to do so. Likewise, the honors
classroom fosters opportunities for students to think deeply and critically about
that experience, about its implications for not only taking texts apart in search
of meaning but also for creating texts in search of understanding. The activity
creates a shared experience of struggle since all students nd the exercise more
challenging than they imagined at the outset, and it also gives them a shared
experience of revelation that is at the heart of an honors education.
The newspaper blackout poetry activity clearly resonated with my honors
students, and several have subsequently used this technique as a way of inter-
preting other works in our curriculum. Using the same technique employed in
the classroom exercise, students have selected newspaper articles, blacked out
the words they did not need, and created poems capturing some essence in the
texts being studied. One example of their work is a blackout poem Samantha L.
Paradis created titled “The Odyssey,” which is based on the article “A feast for all
to enjoy” published in the Morning Sentinel:
visitors
hectic scene
good food
sit enjoy it
cup is lled
dinner was successful
the king still alive at sea
the king’s wife attending and staying
until together.
In the same paper on the next day, in an article titled “Voodoo soothes aficted
Haitians,” Samantha discovered this poem that she titled “The Acropolis and
‘From Marathon to Parthenon.’”
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spirits
belief
sustenance to both the living and the dead
help cope with the disasters
the ruin and the death have left an impact
celebration in communities
pay respect for our brothers
many altars adorned
decorative
Another student used an article by Erik Brady on runner Usain Bolt featured in
USA Today on April 6, 2011 to create her blackout poem about Jesus and the
New Testament gospels:
“The Disciple”
Reach out for him,
call his name.
He belongs to His master plan.
God gives the world his greatest.
Both hands behind him,
perspiration on his back,
breathes hard for his people.
He is love.
People judge:
“That can’t be real.”
People will doubt a lot of things,
But I know within myself, in my heart,
He is God.
Nathan Lessard took a different approach in his use of blackout poetry.
Instead of a newspaper, he used Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis: A Novel and created
poems “to exemplify the thematic commonalities between books.” For example,
his poem “1” (Figure 2) explores the theme of unrequited or unattainable love as
it is found in Sappho’s poetry as well as in other books in our curriculum such as
The Odyssey and The Aeneid. Although told from the male perspective, for Les-
sard the poem easily conjures the experiences and illusions of Calypso and Dido
and in the last stanza echoes of the reunion of Penelope and Odysseus.
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Figure 2. Newspaper Blackout Poem by Nathan Lessard
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Transcription of poem in Figure 2:
A woman,
a look,
He knew he had to follow.
Two doorways.
When he entered one,
She left by the other.
He went back to the old faded decades she wasn’t among.
Black.
A hallway,
A ight of stairs,
And a woman,
Unmistakably the one.
It’s hunger you smell.
My role as a teacher in honors is to guide my students through the seemingly
distant and sometimes strange terrain of ancient texts we read in our curriculum.
When the signposts are lacking, as in the remnants of Sappho’s poetry translated
in Carson’s If Not, Winter, such guidance becomes more challenging as we try
to take a text, especially one so fragmented, and not only make sense of it in its
own time but also in ours. Grappling with questions like this, even when read-
ing complete texts, drives our pedagogy as honors educators; it undergirds our
efforts to engage students in the process of understanding the impulses and ideas
in the work of others and, by extension, their own.
Using the technique of newspaper blackout poetry has proven to be a help-
ful and illuminating way of engaging the honors students I teach in the words
of Sappho and in other texts as well; it has provided a different way of seeing
the words on the paper and thus a different way of thinking about what those
words communicate and why they matter. Like critical thinking, newspaper
blackout poetry is a process of revelation, an uncovering of meaning. Pedagogi-
cally, blackout poetry makes students active participants in the construction of
knowledge and understanding, one of the core objectives of honors education
(Slavin 16); the honors classroom then becomes a model for “taking intellec-
tual risks” (15) that build analytical skills and critical knowledge transferrable to
other course work. This exercise will not make all students lovers of Sappho or
even of poetry, but it will give them an opportunity for active encounters with
texts and for discovery of meanings in an intentional and thoughtful way.
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ACKNOwLEDGMENT
I would like to thank all of the students who allowed me to include their
work in this paper, both those who agreed to be named and those who chose to
remain anonymous.
REFERENCES
Brady, Erik. “Jamaican pride: Usain Bolt lives it up as the world’s fastest man.”
USA Today, 6 April 2011. Web.
Carson, Anne, trans. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. New York: Vintage
Books, 2002. Print.
DeLillo, Don. Cosmopolis: A Novel. New York: Scribner, 2003. Print.
“A feast for all to enjoy.” Morning Sentinel, 28 November 2008: A1. Print.
Kleon, Austin. Austin Kleon. Newspaper blackout poems. 30 April 2009. Web.
Kleon, Austin. Newspaper Blackout. New York: Harper Perennial, 2010. Print.
Ladenheim, Melissa. Birds in Wood: The Carvings of Andrew Zergenyi. Jackson,
MI: University of Mississippi Press, 1996. Print.
Moxley, Jennifer. “Sappho and the Birth of the Lyric Poet.” University of Maine.
2 October 2006. Lecture.
Slavin, Charlie. “Dening Honors Culture.” Journal of the National Collegiate
Honors Council 9.1 (2008): 15–18. Print.
Talbott, Chris. “‘Spooner’ fascinating, but requires patience.” Bangor Daily
News, 19 October 2009: D3. Print.
“Voodoo soothes aficted Haitians.” Morning Sentinel, 29 November 2008:
A4. Print.
_____________________________
The author may be contacted at
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