Recent, Jonathan Frey’s Drawing 2 class used pages from The Bucknellian to turn articles into blackout poetry. Blackout poetry is a form of poetry in which the artist will pick out workds from a chunk of text to turn them into a poem, and blackout the rest of the text to isolate the poem. This format forces the artist to be precise in their work, and think hard about what words they want to see–even if it’s nonsensical in the end.
“As part of Drawing 2, students work through a series of assignments aimed at understanding drawing as a way of thinking about and interacting with the world around them” said Frey. “Blackout poetr is one such assignment that forces students to not start from scratch, but rather to respond to something that is premade, or Readymade, and to transform that thing by taking away from it, rather than adding to it.”
“Before starting, students watch the TED Talk ‘Steal Like an Artist’ by author Austin Kleon, which lays out a history of artists that have transformed language taken from books, magazines, and newspapers into works of art,” Frey continued. “Then students grab a black Sharpie and start blacking out text to reveal new meanings between words that might be artistic, poetic, philosophical, silly, or absurd.”
