From Camara Wallace:
I suggested we do a Blackout Poetry day with the staff at Eskenazi because it’s a good poetry exercise for those who do not write poetry on a daily basis. To do it, you take a page of prose and blackout words until you get a poem. The goal is an 18-20 word poem, which is where the challenge lies. It ended up being a hit of an exercise. We started off by showing them a prose piece and after a Blackout Poem somebody did of the piece. I think it really worked for everyone to see the examples in that order. They got to see the change in not only content, but the emotion. The prose pieces were darker, but the poems created a lighter, more hopeful outlook.
After, we had everyone split in groups to do their own. I worked with Patrick, who is brilliantly descriptive and loves words, as well as Jasmine, quiet but bubbly and in love with fun images. Jasmine said she was happy to be with my group because I was “The Poet”, a big title I hope to live up to. But they both honestly did a great job narrowing down the prose. Whenever they thought they were finished, I would read the poem aloud. It helped them become more comfortable blacking out words because they heard the unnecessary ones. I then took their two poems and synthesized it into one. Jasmine pointed out that she could do this with her own writing and Patrick agreed with her. It was definitely something they could apply to their own writing and fine-tune their writing.
