For the past several years, the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at my alma mater, Smith College, has offered a Blackout Poetry Project to the Smith community, including alums. In the blackout poetry style, one takes a page of pre-existing text and crosses out words or letters to create a poem. The pages are then sometimes embellished with color or other visual art elements. I have participated in prior years, such as the year when the theme was Emily Dashes, using the poems of Emily Dickinson.
This year’s theme is Monster Mash, creating blackout poetry using pages from Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley’s Frankenstein. As you can imagine, the work is quite dark in tone, so I decided to take page 22, which was sent to me from the Center, and transform it into a brighter message.
As it may be difficult to read from the photo, the words I chose to highlight are:
arouse a multitude
excite good people
restore life
a new promise
My visual artist friends will, I’m sure, forgive my rudimentary collage but I felt that we are all in need of a bit of sunshine today.
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Joanne Corey 
this is great, and i love this kind of project – you have chosen inspiriing words of hope –
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Thanks, Beth! Blackout or erasure poetry is a great creative tool and accessible to nearly everyone. I first encountered it in a community poetry workshop.
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Also, thanks because you unlocked a new achievement for me. It’s “The One” for having a post with one view, one like, and one comment. Who knew?
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