Best Kept Secret - HubPage Blackout Poetry

Experience everything there is.

Plan accordingly.

Later, we know inside and out,

the adventure is the experience.

One day, while surfing the web, I stumbled onto a blog. The writer, Austin Kleon, creates pretty excellent poetry out of everyday newspaper articles and a black sharpie. He calls his technique Newspaper Blackout.

By eliminating most of the words in the article, he creates poems out of the words he leaves behind.

After reading on his blog that Austin wrote a book called Newspaper Blackout, I went out and bought (yes, I actually bought a book instead of just checking one out from the library) his Newspaper Blackout book of poetry.

I loved his idea of creating something unique and amazing out of something common and disposable. I almost didn't follow through with my idea of bringing Newspaper Blackout to HubPages, because I didn't want to copy Austin's work, or try to take any credit for his method.

Just to be sure I wasn't stepping on anyone's toes, I decided to email him, telling him about my idea. Why not, right? He emailed back, and said that he encourages others to make their own Newspaper Blackout poetry, and that nobody can copyright a method. So, with Austin's blessing, I decided to give HubPage Blackout a try.

I thought this Newspaper Blackout technique could be an excellent idea for HubPages! So, instead of using newspaper, I am taking my own articles that I have already written for HubPages in an attempt to turn them into poetry.

I was never a very talented poet, but using Austin Kleon's fun blackout technique, I might have a fighting chance to write some decent poetry. My idea is to use my own articles to create Newspaper Blackout poetry. So for this first attempt, I used the top half of my first HubPages article I ever wrote, titled 5 Best Kept Disneyland Secrets - Best Spots to See at Disneyland.

I thought using the blackout technique, I would be able to whip out a poem pretty quickly and easily. However, I probably stared at my article for a good 20 minutes before I caught onto an idea. Then, after some quick work with my handy dandy black sharpie, I had something resembling a poem. It's a start. And I had fun doing it.

My plan of action for my upcoming Newspaper Blackout poems, or in my case, HubPage Blackout poems, is to use my own HubPage articles, in order from the first ones I published, to my most recent articles.

Since this was my first attempt using the Newspaper Blackout technique, I decided to pick one word from the article that I wanted to include in my poem. It was a good first step, something that got me going in some kind of direction.

The word from my article that I began with was "Adventure." Appropriate for my first HubPage Blackout poem, don't you think? From there, the rest of the poem kind of fell into place. We'll see how it goes, so stay tuned...

I encourage anybody else to give this poetry technique a try! As soon as I began writing Hub articles on this topic, my household wanted to give it a try as well. Black out a newspaper article on the way to work, a bulletin while you're sitting in church, or a piece of junk mail, and create something unique, beautiful, or, dare I say funny. Good luck!