When making a blackout poem, sometimes you can get around the Western left-to-right, up-to-down reading problem by using little connecting lines between words. These are a couple recent examples from poems I’m working on for the book.
I didn’t know this until a couple of days ago, but in comics, Scott McCloud calls them “trails.”
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In other news, there’s now a Newspaper Blackout Poems Flickr pool — join the group and share your own!
Suprised there wasn’t a pool before, actually. Anyway, for dutch blackout poems there’s a tag. I actually never uploaded mine to flickr, but I use the tag on my blog, so in search it turns up. Your concept is doing well here in Holland and Belgium. The magazine I work for also gives workshops and we included blackout poems as an important technique for ways of achieving juxtaposition and finding new words, as well as being an end in itself. Okay, that was a lot, but I thought you might liked to hear your ideas are doing well.
Okay, so I just noticed you knew about the tag already. Never mind.
Glad to hear it, Dennis. Now, hopefully we can sell some books over there…
You probably will. I just got news from a poetry magazine that they’re printing one of my blackout poems.
In Altered Book parlance this sort of thing is called “found poetry.” Very cool to see it used in a comic format.