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What is Blackout Poetry? Examples and Inspiration | Writers.com

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What is blackout poetry? It’s the process of redacting text to create an entirely new poem. Find blackout poetry examples and ideas here.

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Button Poetry's Classroom Friendly Poems

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Button Poetry's Classroom Friendly Poems

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Poems that are appropriate (content and language) for youth classroom settings.

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The National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation have partnered with state arts agencies of the United States to support Poetry Out Loud, which encourages the nation's youth to learn about great poetry through memorization and recitation. This program helps students master public speaking skills, build self-confidence, and learn about their literary heritage.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

What are the different ways that Americans protest? Our co-host Rachel Martin has been asking.

RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: Here's Martin Luther King Jr. in 1955 in Montgomery, Ala.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest.

UNIDENTIFIED PEOPLE: Yeah.

(APPLAUSE)

MARTIN: You hear that quote, and you may conjure up images of marches, sit-ins and boycotts. But protest also happens through language itself. Kwame Alexander joins us again to talk about the connection between poetry and protest.

Hi, Kwame.

KWAME ALEXANDER: How are you, Rachel?

MARTIN: I'm well. Thanks.

He is of course the New York Times best-selling author of "Solo," which received a 2018 NAACP Image Award nomination for outstanding youth literary work. Kwame, you have brought another voice to our poetry conversation. Do you want to introduce our special guest?

ALEXANDER: I would be honored to. She's a professor at Virginia Tech, the author of the latest collection of poetry called "A Good Cry" - Nikki Giovanni.

NIKKI GIOVANNI: Kwame is my literary son, so it's wonderful to hear his voice.

MARTIN: (Laughter) Well, thanks so much for being part of our conversation today.

GIOVANNI: Oh, thank you.

MARTIN: I'm going to start off by asking Kwame to describe how you see the connection between poetry and protest.

ALEXANDER: When I was 10 years old, I was living in Brooklyn. My father was the headmaster of my school. And one day, we woke up and he says we're going to march over the Brooklyn Bridge. He said, we're going to march against police brutality. But I was afraid that Mayor Koch was going to open up the bridge, and we were all going to fall in and die. This is what my 10-year-old mind thought.

MARTIN: Right.

ALEXANDER: But they dragged me to this march. We're facing off with police on horses, in riot gear. And I'm crying. And all of a sudden, we start singing. (Chanting) We're fired up. We can't take no more. We're fired up. We can't take no more.

And this was sort of the first moment in my life where I realized that language could empower you.

GIOVANNI: I'm of another generation. My generation grew up in segregation. So what I saw in language was colored only, white only. I saw a lot of bad language that had to be taken apart. What Kwame is doing - which I think is wonderful - his generation is having to try to help people take that next step, that you use language to make it just a little bit better.

MARTIN: We asked you to bring a poem that signifies the connection between poetry and protest today. What did you bring us, Nikki?

GIOVANNI: I brought "Black Lives Matter."

(Reading) I'm not ashamed of our history because I know there is more to come.

I'm not ashamed of slavery, neither bought nor sold, because I know there is another answer.

I'm not ashamed of dark or light skin, straight or curly or nappy - let's call it that - hair.

I'm not ashamed of thick or thin lips, nor of the time we waste singing and dancing.

We taught the white folks to sing and dance, too.

I'm proud of Simon the Cyrene. Nobody made him help Jesus. He did his part.

I'm proud of the woman who moaned on the ship at the 10th day for admitting if not defeat then certainly change.

I'm proud of the rappers who rap. And most especially, I'm proud that Black Lives Matter.

We do.

We honestly do.

MARTIN: That poem, written by Nikki Giovanni, called "Black Lives Matter."

Kwame, you also brought this amazing poem by Pablo Neruda that speaks to this conversation. Can you read this?

ALEXANDER: Sure. And Neruda, as we all know, began his career writing love poems...

MARTIN: Yeah.

ALEXANDER: ...And as he matured, witnessed the Spanish Civil War, his poems became more political.

(Reading) You are going to ask - and where are the lilacs? And the poppy-petalled metaphysics? And the rain repeatedly spattering its words and drilling them full of apertures and birds?

I'll tell you all the news.

Look at broken Spain.

From every house burning metal flows instead of flowers, from every socket of Spain, Spain emerges and from every dead child a rifle with eyes, and from every crime bullets are born which will one day find the bull's-eye of your hearts.

And you'll ask - why doesn't his poetry speak of dreams and leaves and the great volcanoes of his native land?

Come and see the blood in the streets. Come and see, the blood in the streets. Come and see the blood, in the streets.

And that's an excerpt from Pablo Neruda's poem "I Explain A Few Things."

MARTIN: Wow.

GIOVANNI: Oh, my.

MARTIN: Right.

GIOVANNI: That was lovely (laughter). That was lovely. (Reciting) Let us go then, you and I, when the evening is stretched out against the sky like a patient etherized upon the table. Oh, do not say you're not able (ph).

MARTIN: What's that from, Nikki?

GIOVANNI: T.S. Eliot.

ALEXANDER: You've got two poets in the room, Rachel. We're just - we just go...

MARTIN: But I love - she just, like, sprinkles it around. This is like a...

ALEXANDER: This is how we talk.

MARTIN: ...Battle of the poets here.

GIOVANNI: Oh, no - he'll beat me because I'm way dumber than he is on that (laughter).

MARTIN: Nikki, where do you see poetry making change in this moment?

GIOVANNI: I don't see anything other than poetry making change. Poetry is something that we all turn to. If you think about going into space - and I'm a big space fan - what are you going to take? You're going to have to take poems because - and excuse me, Kwame - you can take one or two novels. But you know...

(LAUGHTER)

MARTIN: Yours, of course.

GIOVANNI: Of course. But you can't take but so many novels. But you can take a book of poetry because every day that you read it, it's going to be different. And it's going to bring another light to you.

ALEXANDER: Rachel, I think we should take some of these young poets who are writing about protest, people like Aja Monet, who wrote an amazing poem about Black Lives Matter. It's a poem called "Word Warriors." This is her reading an excerpt of the poem.

(SOUNDBITE OF POEM, "WORD WARRIORS")

AJA MONET: Show me a man willing to fight beside me, my hand in his, the color of courage. There is no mountaintop worth seeing without us. Meet me in the trenches, where we lay our bodies down in the valley of a voice. Say her name.

GIOVANNI: Oh.

MARTIN: That's powerful.

GIOVANNI: Absolutely.

MARTIN: Nikki Giovanni is an author and a professor at Virginia Tech. Her most recent collection is "A Good Cry."

Thank you so much.

GIOVANNI: Thank you.

ALEXANDER: Thank you, Nikki. We love you.

GIOVANNI: Oh, we love you. I'll talk to you later on.

MARTIN: (Laughter).

ALEXANDER: All right.

GIOVANNI: OK. Thanks, sweetheart.

MARTIN: So the next time we talk to you, Kwame, it's going to be Valentine's Day. And what we want you all to do, dear listeners, we want you to share a specific moment in your life regarding love and relationships. And then we're going to find a poem for it. This is the whole range of experiences. Right?

ALEXANDER: Yeah, we want specific moments. We want that loved one who's no longer here and what you were feeling that day.

MARTIN: Right.

ALEXANDER: We want, you know, that first look in someone's eyes when you saw them and you knew this is the person.

MARTIN: Yeah. And then we're going to give you a poem about that.

So go to npr.org/morningpoem to share your love anecdotes - again, npr.org/morning poem. And we look forward to hearing your submissions.

(SOUNDBITE OF TAKENOBU'S "MOMOTARO")

INSKEEP: Rachel Martin speaking with authors Kwame Alexander and Nikki Giovanni.

Copyright © 2018 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.

NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR's programming is the audio record.

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: What are the different ways that Americans protest? Our co-host Rachel Martin has been asking. RACHEL MARTIN, BYLINE: Here's Martin Luther King Jr. in 1955 in Montgomery, Ala. (SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING) MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.: The only weapon that we have in our hands this evening is the weapon of protest.

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"all def poetry" poetry "all def" "spoken word" narrative "russell simmons" literature "poetry slam" "all def digital"

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All Def Poetry is a new channel brought to you by Russell Simmons - a world-renowned champion of the spoken word art form. Fresh, riveting, and featuring some of the best voices in the genre, All Def Poetry brings you the raw power of spoken word!

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Free; Android and IOS. Have a poem sent to your smartphone eveyday, if you choose.

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Best poems by famous poets all around the world on Poem Hunter. Read poem and quotes from most popular poets.

The world has many gifts for those who really reach them.

The greed of every human stands naked when it come to sacrifice.

"Skepticism" is that anything more than we used to mean when we said, "Well, what have we here?"

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Best poems by famous poets all around the world on Poem Hunter. Read poem and quotes from most popular poets. Search for poems and poets using the poetry search engine.

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Free; Android and iOS

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Play with words: Select words from a passage; erase the rest; create a completely new phrase!
Used as an exercise in Art therapy & Creative Writing workshops. (Ad-free)

Create amazing expressions in minutes by selecting words from an existing block of text, erasing the rest to carve out a whole new or hidden meaning.

This form of creative writing is also known by various names such as "Blackout Poetry", "Found Poetry", "Erasure Poetry", "Caviardage Technique", "Redaction", etc.
Repurposing / Redaction / Reordering of content stimulates the brain and enhances the ability to unlearn, thus enabling oneself to explore possibilities outside of one's own boundaries. The resulting artwork would be very diverse than from what you would do given an infinite canvas.

Art therapists use this technique in their workshops with Hikikomori (persons who exhibit extreme withdrawal from society) & autistic children.

Using the app select words from existing text, form sentences. Blackout / Dim the rest. Style and export to the image gallery. Share your creations on social media. Choose from a set of carefully themed templates. Curated fonts are available taking into account people for special needs ( low vision, dyslexia etc). Use your own images as the backdrop for your writing. All this in just a couple of clicks!

Works for language scripts which use " " as word separator.

Highlight your state of mind, give voice to social causes, find hidden meanings, inspire new thoughts. There's no particular order though the fun happens when you create something new as opposed to just skimming words. Users have created small poems, haikus, etc.

And no - you do not have to be a writer nor a poet to create blackout poetry. And the experience is quite calming and meditative. Great insights arise, to reflect upon.

With each attempt a different word or phrase will catch your imagination!
With each style will capture a different mood or phrase! Steer through a treasure house of fresh ideas and thoughts!

Tap away, flirt with words and create magic! Fill your lull moments with creativity!

Visit us at https://blackoutbard.wixsite.com/bbard

App reconfigured to execute in Light Mode always.
Minor fixes in User Interface based on user feedback

Really Good, but has Flaws

I really, really like this app and the features.
However, the directions are worded confusingly and checking the help didn't clear up anything I was wondering. The images exported are extremely fuzzy and blurry, have a white border, and can't be cropped in the app.
If you fix those things, it'll be golden. I really like it.

We were not in a position to maintain the app for the past 4 years, but now, Blackout Bard has been refreshed with all the fixes based on user feedback. Hope this addresses your concerns.
Thank you for your feedback and patience.

updated review

develeper update has made this a really fun app to use

We were not in a position to maintain the app for the past 4 years, but now, Blackout Bard has been refreshed with all the fixes based on user feedback. Hope this addresses your concerns.
Thank you for your feedback and patience.

Doesn't work

This app seems great for its purpose but it keeps crashing for simple things.

We were not in a position to maintain the app for the past 4 years, but now, Blackout Bard has been refreshed with all the fixes based on user feedback. Hope this addresses your concerns.
Thank you for your feedback and patience.

The developer, UberYogi, indicated that the app's privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer's privacy policy.

Data Not Linked to You

The following data may be collected but it is not linked to your identity:

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

Information

Compatibility

iPhone

Requires iOS 16.0 or later and a device with the A12 Bionic chip or later.

iPad

Requires iPadOS 16.0 or later and a device with the A12 Bionic chip or later.

Apple Vision

Requires visionOS 1.0 or later and a device with the A12 Bionic chip or later.

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‎Create amazing expressions in minutes by selecting words from an existing block of text, erasing the rest to carve out a whole new or hidden meaning. This form of creative writing is also known by various names such as "Blackout Poetry", "Found Poetry", "Erasure Poetry", "Caviardage Technique", "...

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Free, with Pro versions starting at $1.99; iOS

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"Great quotes from great minds".

We are providing millions of quotes and sayings with images. There are many different types of quotes like Love, Life, Inspirational, Motivational, Funny, Happiness, Romance and many more image quotes.

I put this collection of quotes together to help you stay motivated and focused. All we have to do is stay motivated and keep acting on our goals. I hope this application will give you an extra push to reach for your goal and achieve success and all the achievements life has to offer.

Key features:
- Millions of inspiration, motivational, love and life quotes from famous personalities and authors.
- Categorised with 40+ categories like Inspirational, Motivational,Love, Life, Success, Funny, Happiness, Romance and much more.
- Set as Favourite which quotes like you most. Favourite quotes are access in Off line mode.
- Amazing user friendly design.
- Quick sharing feature that enables to share via Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp and other sharing apps.

Amazing

Can't express how much these quotes seem like they were talking to me lol

Not 4+ at all

Great app very heartwarming. But the thing is I don't know why it says 4+ cause I downloaded this and it said SO MANY cuss words in every single quote. More like 12+. Plus who would want their child repeating those words. Overall it's great.

The developer, Lazy Fox Apps Studio, indicated that the app's privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. For more information, see the developer's privacy policy.

Data Used to Track You

The following data may be used to track you across apps and websites owned by other companies:

Data Linked to You

The following data may be collected and linked to your identity:

Privacy practices may vary, for example, based on the features you use or your age. Learn More

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‎"Great quotes from great minds". We are providing millions of quotes and sayings with images. There are many different types of quotes like Love, Life, Inspirational, Motivational, Funny, Happiness, Romance and many more image quotes. I put this collection of quotes together to help you stay motiv...

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Free; iOS

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The THF Haiku app has been updated for 2015, for iOS8 on the Apple platform. (If your mobile device is not compatible with iOS7 or iOS8, you need do nothing - simply continue to enjoy the THF Haiku app as you have been doing.) It now includes well over 1500 haiku from poets around the globe, showing the range of topics and form characteristic of today's - not your grandfather's - haiku! Shake your iPhone or other Apple mobile device and a new poem appears. Share your favorites with friends with a click.

Some recent additions were selected from the Per Diem feature for 2014. Thanks to all who allowed us to feature your work! Upgrade yours today by going to the iTunes store and downloading it - still free, of course.

Red Dragonfly had this to say about the THF Haiku App on her blog:

"The Haiku Foundation, with their release of THF Haiku, their haiku app for the iPhone, has recently made waiting in line a task that is no longer fearful to me. I just pull out my phone, punch at the screen a bit to make the soothing THF Haiku backdrop appear, and then spend a relaxing few minutes shaking my phone (really, you just need to tilt it a little, so you won't look completely insane in public) to see a new haiku with every shake. There's a wonderful variety - 365 of them so far, with more promised for the future. Some I tilted into recently:"

midsummer solstice
the bonfire luring me back
to my maiden name
     - an'ya

the shadow in the folded napkin
     - Cor van den Heuvel

Every second, a tree, a bird, a chimney, a woman
     - James Kirkup

THF Haiku app will not use any of your personal information. It does not access profile data or information about your mobile device. It only accesses your e-mail, Facebook, and Twitter profiles for the purpose of posting haiku that you explicitly choose to share.

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The THF Haiku app has been updated for 2015, for iOS8 on the Apple platform. (If your mobile device is not compatible with iOS7 or iOS8, you need do nothing - simply continue to enjoy the THF Haiku app as you have been doing.)

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Poets.org offers an intuitive and easy navigable repository of teaching guides and lessons plans.

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Home - The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and...

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An award-winning website dedicated to creating "high-quality teaching resources for educators."

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Poetry

Each week, Education World's Great Sites for Teaching About page highlights Web sites to help educators work timely themes into their lessons. This week's sites are among the best on the Web for teaching about poetry.

1. Poetry for Kids
http://www.poetry4kids.com

Can't Stop Laughing
It seems that I cannot stop laughing
No matter how hard that I try.
I'm laughing so hard that my sides ache.
I'm laughing so hard I could cry.

From the moment they arrive at Kenn Nesbitt's poetry site, your students will be laughing too. Kenn posts all his funny poems for kids here first. The most recent rhymes bump the old favorites, so get there quick. You won't want to miss any of the current Funny Forty, which include such funny-bone ticklers as "My Senses All Are Backwards," "Be Grateful for Your Epidermis," and "What to Remember in School." The evolving how to page on rhyme schemes is full of fun and useful tips for aspiring young poets.

2. Why Poetry What
http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/fil/pages/samwhypoetrmi.html
This Internet-based poetry sampler provides a lesson that emphasizes the emotional content of poetry over its structure and meter. True to the subject sampler format, the activity provides students with a list of guided questions about specific poems and challenges them to locate the answers online. The variety of poetic styles found here is amazing. You'll probably find very few poetry teaching plans that include Shel Silverstein, Robert Frost,and Beowulf!

3. KidzPage
http://web.aimnet.com/~veeceet/kids/kidzpage.html
KidzPage is a wonderful place for students to investigate a variety of poetic styles and find inspiration for their own rhymes. The first section of the site features classic children's poetry -- in sections with such offbeat titles asHave a bash with Ogden Nash, For Better or Verse, and Verse and Worse! as well as familiar nursery rhymes and fun songs. The second part highlights verse -- some light, some not -- by students from around the world.

4. Walt Whitman Hypertext Archive
http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/whitman
This site, dedicated to the father of modern American poetry, houses all of Whitman's works as well as biographical information, manuscripts, notebooks, letters, and critical reviews. Although the materials here are not specifically intended for classroom use, theArchive in the Classroom section provides a useful collection of suggested activities and projects for teachers.

5. Poetry
http://prominence.com/java/poetry
If you like playing with refrigerator magnets, you'll enjoy this site. Visitors click and drag online word tiles to form lines of poetry. The site, which requires a Java-enabled browser, is great for visual learners -- and for those who need a little instant inspiration!
Article by Walter McKenzie
Education World®
Copyright © 2000 Education World

Please check out our other articles this week:

04/03/2000

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GREAT SITES FOR TEACHING ABOUT...Poetry | Education World

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Each week, Education World's Great Sites for Teaching About page highlights Web sites to help educators work timely themes into their lessons. This week's sites are among the best on the Web for teaching about poetry. Poetry for Kids http://www.poetry4kids.com Can't Stop Laughing It seems that I cannot stop laughing No matter how hard that I try.

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Teacher-created lesson plans and resources are highlighted on their Poetry Resources webpage.

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poetry resources webcasts presidents poet laureates state poems bibliography guide virtual program service digital reference section library of congress

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Library of Congress Poetry Resources (Virtual Programs & Services, Library of Congress)

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Library of Congress Poetry Resources: a comprehensive guide to locating poetry resources available on the Library of Congress Web site, compiled by Peter Armenti, Digital Reference Specialist (Virtual Services and Programs, Digital Reference Section, Library of Congress)

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The Poetry Foundation offers an assortment of articles that read more like peer-to-peer talks than teaching guides.

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Poems, readings, poetry news and the entire 110-year archive of POETRY magazine.

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Listen Up: These Young Black Poets Have a Message

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Ten teenage writers confront an America in flames and fight back, in their own words.

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Loaded with lesson plans and ideas for incorporating poetry into curricula for students of all ages, Scholastic's poetry site is well organized and descriptive.

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Celebrate National Poetry Month with these resources to help you teach students how to read, write, and share poems.

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Search for classic poems for your classes.

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Poems from different poets all around the world. Thousands of poems, quotes and poets. Search for poems and poets using the Poetry Search Engine. Quotes from all famous poets.

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subscribe to Life Kit podcast

subscribe to Life Kit podcast

Listen, I know how this looks. An NPR piece about "how to appreciate poetry" reads like self-parody. I get it! But - in case you haven't heard - things are extremely bad right now. And if you're holed up at home and have burned through all the TV you can stand, you may just need some art to help you process that sadness or anger or fear. And this might be a good time to give poetry a try.

A great poem can be there for you - the same way other works of art you hold dear can. Franny Choi, an educator and co-host of the poetry podcast VS(pronounced like "verses" or "versus," get it?), says a great poem "makes me want to get out of my chair and pace around the room. It makes me want to throw my hands up and show it to somebody or say it out loud or shout it from the rooftops ... when I have [it], it's the only thing that matters."

But if you haven't flexed your poetry muscles in a while, or if you've always thought poems were the domain of clove cigarette smokers and adjunct professors, that feeling might be a little hard to tap into. Here are 5 tips that might help you get there.

1. Don't approach poetry like it's school.

Every poetry expert we talked to pointed to the way poetry is taught in schools as the biggest barrier to entry for most people.

"Most commonly, people are taught that the way to engage with a poem is by parsing it, by trying to understand it and master it, and be able to write an essay about it," says Choi. "And I think that keeps us from really developing personal relationships with poetry."

Let's go back real quick to 10th grade, and you imagine you just got assigned to read that Robert Frost poem, " Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening." You know it - it's the one that ends with the lines:

The woods are lovely, dark and deep,

But I have promises to keep,

And miles to go before I sleep,

And miles to go before I sleep.

A classic! But if you were to take the advice of The College Board, you'd recognize the poem as: "a tidy four-quatrain stanzaic structure, is written in iambic tetrameters, and has a rhyme scheme that effectively knits together one stanza's sounds and images and those of the next."

Stanzas, meter, form - all that stuff is well and good if you're already bought in, but it doesn't mean anything if you only have a passing interest in poetry.

"What's the use of understanding everything that's working ... If the end result is that you are able to answer a reading comprehension question?" says Choi.

So rest easy. There's no quiz at the end!

2. Don't worry about "getting it."

Even when there's no formal graded quiz, people still put pressure on themselves to crack a poem, to unlock its meaning or to answer some unanswerable question about "what was the poet trying to say?" Don't do it!

Harryette Mullen is a professor at UCLA, and a poet herself. Her work plays around with language, and there are usually a lot of layers and meanings to her poetry. But even she says, "people don't trust themselves because they're thinking in the back of their minds 'no, there's a right answer, there's a correct answer and I wanna be sure I'm not giving a wrong answer.'"

She says, instead of trying to answer specific questions, when you read a poem, ask yourself some broader questions:

What overall impression do you get?

What ideas float around in your mind?

What do you feel?

Again - there's no test, there's no wrong answer. Just look around in your own brain as you read the poem and take in what's there.

"Those kind of overall impressions, I think most of us do get," says Mullen. "We are left with something." Whatever that "something" is - trust it!

And Mullen says if something in the poem is throwing you off - whether it be a weird image or a funny phrase - stop, take a breath, and read it again later. Sometimes that can mean right away. Other times it means take a week. Or a month. Or a year.

For a while Mullen couldn't really get into the work of poet William Blake - another one of those classic canon guys. It didn't click for her in high school, and not again in college. But she read his work again recently, and all of a sudden it opened up to her.

"Sometimes we change," she says. "The poem is still the same, the text is still the same ... But we return to the poem with a different understanding."

3. Read it out loud.

Hopefully by now the pressure's off. You're getting over any scars from 8th grade English. You're learning to trust yourself and your thoughts and your taste. You open up a poem, you give it a read and you get ... something? Maybe? You're not quite sure? One thing that helps, say our experts, is to read it aloud.

"We have to remember that poetry was an oral art form before anything else," says Choi. "And that oral tradition has been with us for thousands and thousands of years so I think a lot of information can be gained from reading poems out loud."

If that feels weird to you, you can try and mouth along to a poem. But Choi says it's best to read it out loud and read it out loud a few different ways:

1. Like you're savoring every word, and every syllable, trying out the shapes of the word in your mouth

2. Like you're explaining something really difficult to someone else.

Fun fact: here at NPR when reporters read their scripts, it's sometimes helpful to have them read them in different ways, with stresses on different words. It helps them find the grove of their writing, which is essentially what you're trying to do with someone else's poetry. You can make the very same words sound entirely different. Try it.

4. Visualize the poem.

A poem might offer you a stack of images, but there are plenty of gaps to fill. So go ahead and fill them! Mullen says to think of the poem like it's a movie or a play, and you're the director.

"What colors would you use?" she says." What kind of setting is there? If there's light what kind of light would it be? Harsh light? Twilight? Dusk? Would it be indoors or outdoors? Can you imagine the speaker?

These brain pictures will help illuminate whatever it is you seem to be getting out of the poem. And keep in mind the first two tips: this isn't school, and there isn't a single answer. What you see is what you see.

If you need help - Choi suggests an exercise that involves just doodling images that really stick out as you read the poem. That might help you find a common theme or a through line.

5. Read a bunch of poetry.

When we talked in Tip #1 about not approaching poetry like it's school - we focused on the more homework-y aspect of poetry. But it's also true when it comes to what you're actually reading.

The experts we talked to say their poetry curriculum in schools was mostly centered around the classical canon - your Shakespeares and your Frosts. But everyone stressed that the world of poetry is a lot bigger than that (not to mention less white, less male, less old). So if poems about walking in the woods when it's snowing aren't your jam then keep looking - there's something out there for you.

Or better yet, when you can, head to your local poetry reading. Shihan van Clief and Dante Basco co-founded Da Poetry Lounge - a long running poetry reading in Los Angeles that takes place every Tuesday. On a recent visit, the readings there varied from more slam-oriented poetry, to more formal readings, to people practicing their rap lyrics, to a guy looking for a girl he'd met at the Chateau Marmont years ago (hope she's reading this, my dude!).

Van Clief says to be honest about your tastes and what you're looking for - if you're looking for something closer to Shel Silverstein than the latest Pulitzer Prize winning collection, that's fine.

"There's just as much value in that because it gives them a stepping stone," says Van Clief. "It gives them something they can digest quicker than someone going 'here, take this and try and figure it out.'"

There are readings at libraries and bookstores, and bars and clubs. If you can't get to one, there are poetry instagram accounts and youtube channels (some recommendations below).

Resources:
We'd love to hear from you. If you have a good life hack, leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823 or email us at The audio version of this story was produced by Andee Tagle. LifeKit@npr.org. Your tip could appear in an upcoming episode.

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We Need Art Right Now. Here's How To Get Into Poetry

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