#TGIIF: The only Instagram account to follow this Friday is @colette.lh

24 Oct / 2018 / Scanner /

Colette Love Hilliard is a writer and teacher currently chronicling her journey of love, marriage, and infertility through poetry and art. She is also a storyteller that knows how to play with typography and words in order to make her blackout poetry as intriguing as possible.

Hilliard's work has appeared in a variety of literary magazines and her debut collection of blackout poetry, A Wonderful Catastrophe, is available worldwide. The book fuses art with text and offers a raw, honest, and personal account of her experience with infertility.

"Blackout poetry focuses on rearranging words to create a different meaning. Also known as newspaper blackout poetry, the author uses a permanent marker to cross out or eliminate whatever words or images he sees as unnecessary or irrelevant to the effect he's seeking to create. The central idea is to devise a completely new text from previously published words and images, which the reader is free to interpret as he wishes" notes Ralph Heibutzki.

Identified as the brainchild of author, cartoonist and web designer Austin Kleon, these otherworldly poets reshape the words and their meaning. "Search for striking words or images in daily newspapers, which they emphasize by crossing out the unneeded text with a permanent marker" read the guidelines posted on the Newspaper Blackout website.

"As Kleon has acknowledged, poets have been rearranging words since the Dadaist and Surrealist movements of the 1920s. For example, poet Tristan Tzara started a riot at a surrealist rally by proposing to randomly pull words out of a hat to create new works. During the 1950s, Beat writers and poets like William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin literally cut up existing texts, such as newspaper articles, with scissors. Unlike these approaches, however, blackout poets are built around short pieces of text, which the creator uses to build a mood or create a specific effect" he adds.

Follow Hilliard's blackout poetry on Instagram here