In this short video, the UK filmmaker, writer and artist Andrew Lavers introduces viewers to blackout poetry (or erasure), in which a writer creates poems by hiding words in found materials including books, magazines and newspapers, letting the text that remains form a new work. Inspired by the US writer and blackout poet Austin Kleon, Lavers explores the form as both an art in its own right and as a way of overcoming a creative block. Reading an original blackout poem, detailing his process and providing some useful background information, Lavers makes a convincing case for blackout poetry as tool to break out ‘in case of creative emergency’ when another project needs a spark.
When the lights went out and the city came together over two days in Toronto
Directed by Sharron Mirsky
