Last Friday, April 5, Literary Cleveland published an online special issue of blackout poetry tied to the solar eclipse in its literary journal “Gordon Square Review.”
Blackout poetry is created by blacking out, or covering, the original text in a passage to create poetry with the remaining words. In the same way the moon covers the sun during an eclipse, blackout poetry uses erasure of an existing text to reveal something new.
Blackout Poetry Winner Lisa TurnerAfter receiving more than 150 submissions for the Blackout Poetry Contest, “Gordon Square Review” editors narrowed the pool to 15 finalists. Local poet Alyssa Perry selected the winner and two runners up.
The winning blackout poem is “Be Kind 2 Her” by Lisa Turner. Turner uses ripped out images of sky, buildings, and home to cover the source text, “Her Kind” by Anne Sexton.
“The poem itself becomes a shelf for ‘rearranging’ the ‘misunderstood routes,’ opening out dimensions of meaning,” says Perry in her remarks, “which is to say, the poem has reached a hard-won understanding and moves with great grace beyond it.”
Sarah Ferrato is first runner up for “Others Would Get Jealous” and Sarah Nichols is second runner up for “Los Angeles Disappeared.”
The Turner received a $500 prize, and all 15 finalists’ works, including Turner, Ferrato, and Nichols, were published in the journal. Of the 15 writers published, 10 are northeast Ohio poets.
“In this special issue, we hear from a wide range of voices on a wide range of topics—from remote work to climate change; from a fool’s spell to new beginnings; from Lake Erie to Palestine,” says “Gordon Square Review” editor-in-chief Jason Harris. “Building the Blackout Poetry issue, was exciting because I not only had to consider the strength of the individual blackout poem, but also how the source texts may or may not speak to one another in the larger issue.”
Literary Cleveland hosted a staged reading, “The Gift of Darkness,” on Saturday, April 6 at the Cleveland Public Library as part of the Cleveland Humanities Festival. Four local actors performed work by 20 local authors on the theme of awe as it relates to the eclipse.