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Show HN: A tool for creating blackout poetry

by bobbiechen on 4/5/25, 3:09 AM with 12 comments

• by MaxfordAndSons on 4/8/25, 6:27 PM

  Sweet! I love erasure (aka blackout) poetry.

  If anyone want to see some high quality examples of the form, check out:

  - O Mission Repo, by Travis McDonald, an erasure of the 9/11 Comission Report

  - A Humument, by Tom Phillips, an erasure of A Human Document, a victorian novel of manners; A Humument is unusual in that each page is beautifully and thematically hand painted over by Philips, not just blacked out or erased as is more typical of the form.

  - Radi Os, by Ronald Johnson, an erasure of Paradise Lost

• by mkremins on 4/8/25, 6:32 PM

  Really cool! I also made some blackout poetry tools back in like 2019, maybe of interest… https://mkremins.github.io/blackout/interactive

• by tekknolagi on 4/8/25, 10:52 PM

  Hah, nice. I made this crappy version for a friend to use in a joke: https://bernsteinbear.com/redactor/

• by ray__ on 4/8/25, 6:06 PM

  This is really cool! Any tips for finding poems hidden in a large block of text?

  It reminds me of the poem composed from one of Trump's tweets: "O, the Pelican. so smoothly doth he crest. a wind god!" There are lots of other examples on r/othepelican.

• by mc3301 on 4/9/25, 12:27 AM

  I thought blackout poetry was when you write poetry while in a blackout state and can't remember it the next day.