The first time I had much use for poetry came in college, freshmen year. My professor assigned each of us to memorize a poem and recite it in class. Horrified, I chose ee cummings’ “anyone lived in a pretty how town” and began the process of reading it a million times between tennis practices and snowball fights.
Over and over and over I read it, trying to memorize how the words and lines zipped together without the usual literary wardrobe of grammar. I can still remember pieces, twenty five years later: “anyone lived in a pretty how town / with up so many floating bells down…” “no one loved him more by more…”
As I read and read, I realized the poem featured two characters named “anyone” and “no one.” I began to understand how the years passed quickly through the lines and stanzas, as cycles of time spun through small word choices. I saw its heartbreak. Reading by reading I began to find it utterly beautiful. By the time my friends and I went out to practice for our class presentation by reciting our poems in the middle of Pomona College’s outdoor Greek theater late one night, I loved it.
But I was still really nervous.
As an educator, I’ve often wondered how to help students get as close up to a poem as I got to ee cummings’ “anyone lived in a pretty how town.” What makes it possible to step inside the story of a poem, try on its language, dream its dreams? Maybe without having to recite it though?
This month I had a chance to explore some of Robert Scott Root-Bernstein and Michèle Root-Bernstein book, Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People. Inside, they discuss the risk of education staying on a kind of hypothetical parallel track to the realities of the world, each so close to each other and yet never quite touching. Imagination and experience, they suggest, have become disconnected. “This being the case,” write the Root-Bernsteins, “the task for educators, self-learners, and parents is simply put: to reunite the two. And the world’s most creative people tell us how in their own words and deeds, in their own explorations of their own minds at work. What they find as individuals, when taken as a whole, is a common set of thinking tools at the heart of creative understanding” (24-25).
What are these tools, you might well ask, and what do they have to do with ee cummings, students, and the study of poetry? The tools are: observing, imaging, abstracting, recognizing patterns, forming patterns, analogizing, body thinking, empathizing, dimensional thinking, modeling, playing, transforming, and synthesizing.
They’re pretty fascinating to play around with when it comes to designing curriculum. How might we help students better understand a poem, using these tools? I decided to experiment with designing around patterns when it comes to ee cummings, a master of writing in rhythms and cycles.
The nexus of patterns and poetry had me thinking of blackout poetry at first, but of course, I already had a poem. I didn’t need a new one.
So I decided to try a new spin on the blackout – blacking out for discovering meaning, instead of to create a new poem. Instead of a blackout poem, I would try a poem blackout, illuminating what patterns I could find by eliminating everything else.
For me, the results were powerful. So today on the pod, let me walk you through how to do a poem blackout of your own in class, with any poem you might want to dig deeply into with students. If you love blackout poetry, I think you’ll love this riff. As usual, I really encourage you to check out the show notes for the oh-so-necessary visuals to complement this episode.
I started my experiment by thinking about what students might be looking for in a poem, as they search for meaning through craft.
I came up with a short starter stack of possibilities:
- Sensory Details
- Themes
- Style: Unique craft moves
- Striking Imagery
- Word Choice
- Personal Connections
Next, I imagined blacking out a poem in search of just one of these things, keeping it simple. I decided to go back to my ee cummings memories and find a poem of his now in the public domain. I stumbled upon “Impressions IV” from the ee cummings free archive right away and ran with it.
Let me share it here:
the hours rise up putting off stars and it is
dawn
into the street of the sky light walks scattering poems
on earth a candle is
extinguished the city
wakes
with a song upon her
mouth having death in her eyes
and it is dawn
the world
goes forth to murder dreams….
i see in the street where strong
men are digging bread
and i see the brutal faces of
people contented hideous hopeless cruel happy
and it is day,
in the mirror
i see a frail
man
dreaming
dreams
dreams in the mirror
and it
is dusk on earth
a candle is lighted
and it is dark.
the people are in their houses
the frail man is in his bed
the city
sleeps with death upon her mouth having a song in her eyes
the hours descend,
putting on stars….
in the street of the sky night walks scattering poems
Now that I had a poem and a plan, I focused my first poetry blackout around striking imagery. I began to black out everything in the poem that wasn’t a striking image, and the experience was powerful for me. Without everything else in between, distracting me from the images, they brightened and jumped off the page at me.
I realized, for the first time, that two of the images repeated dramatically with tiny shifts. Early in the poem came the line: “into the street of the sky light walks scattering poems” and later came “in the street of the sky night walks scattering poems.”
Suddenly these two rhyming walkers in the streets of the sky felt like the poem’s gatekeepers. I illustrated them on top of my black canvas with patches of morning sky and night sky, silhouettes of light and night walking along the sky leaving splotches of rainbow paint behind them to represent the poems they scattered.
I also noticed a repeating image of the city, again with a small tweak. “the city/wakes/with a song upon her/ mouth having death in her eye” comes early in the poem, and then “the city / sleeps with death upon her mouth having a song in her eye” as the day comes to a close. I illustrated these images atop the blackness as well, adding a huge eye with gray behind it for death, and bright colors for the song. The images I added served as my annotation, though I could also have annotated the patterns I found in words, or used a combination of both.
I could trace a few of the other images I found, and how I saw them differently once everything else in the poem was removed, but I think you get the idea. By looking ONLY at the most striking imagery, and blacking out the rest, I recognized patterns I hadn’t seen before, and soon felt utterly ready to explain them and share my opinion of their purpose in the poem as I considered them standing alone.
But what of the rest of the poem? As a class activity, you could do this poetry blackout in one of two ways.
You could divide students into groups, and let each of them take on a role for their poem, blacking out for striking imagery, theme, connections, etc., adding their annotations in the forms of illustration and their own words of analysis, and then presenting back to each other to create a group gallery for the piece.
OR, you could spend an entire period having each student blackout for different things, as I did with this poem.
Next, I tried themes, and found it similarly powerful. Blacking out only for themes, it felt like a whole new poem to me.
Next, I considered style, and again, it was a brand new experience of the poem. I color coded my annotations, focusing more on explaining what I saw in words this time than on illustrations, since it was harder to illustrate concepts of style.
I tried one more remix, blacking out for connections I could make, personally to the poem. This time I annotated with both my own responses to the poem and illustration.
By the end of my experiment with blacking out the text for different threads of meaning, I was convinced this would be a wonderful strategy for students to find deeper meaning inside any poem.
Once they’ve completed the blackout activity, in Slides, on Canva, or on paper, the subsequent gallery will reveal patterns, ideas, and connections to help them see it in a whole new way, if my experience is any indication.
Try it out for Yourself
I hope you’ll try this activity for yourself soon. Students can copy and paste the text of any poem into a canvas on Canva or Slides, blackout with black rectangular shapes of different sizes, and focus on whatever core threads you want them to (style, themes, sensory details, striking imagery, etc.). You could certainly also do this on paper, blacking out with a pencil or marker and then adding annotations with small post-its or by taping on small squares of white paper. Whether they’re working digitally or physically, you can invite students to annotate with images and icons, words, or both. Feel free to project my models as examples, and maybe work through an example of your own on your projector live with student help as well. Once students are finished, whether they’re working individually or in groups, be sure to wrap up this lesson with a digital gallery where students can browse each other’s work, or a physical gallery where they can wander the room and see what has been created.
Sources Cited:
Root-Bernstein, M. and Root-Bernstein R. Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World’s Most Creative People. Mariner Books. https://books.google.com/books?id=DARiLCJc0dEC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false. Accessed Oct. 14, 2025.
