Text Prompt

Redacting is the act of censoring or obscuring part of a text. Sometimes it is done by the author themselves, and more often it is done by someone else.

I want you to write a poem and then during or after writing the poem choose at least one, or ideally five or more words to redact from the poem. How is the poem changed by this simple act? This is not the same as a “black out” or erasure poem”. The words you are using are your own, and well over 50% of them should be visible.

When writing on physical paper, you can do this easily with a marker, ideally a black sharpie. If you are writing your poem in a Word document, you can use the highlight feature and set the highlight color to black, this creates a black box over the word or words. Or you can just write the word redacted in place of the word you wanted to use.

Image Prompt

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photo by Jon Tyson