Fade to Black

If you take someone’s written words and edit them, do they become yours? This is the question the 8th graders of Clinton asked themselves as we explored Blackout Poetry, created when a poet takes a marker (usually a black marker) to an already established text, like a newspaper article or essay, and starts redacting words until a poem or image is formed. After reading “We’re not good enough to not practice” by Kiese Laymon, students picked up a marker and created Blackout poems, part poem and part visual art, inspired by this text.