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The Kansas City Star is running a blackout poetry contest and wrote up some good tips for making your own poems, many of them from Newspaper Blackout. I thought I’d share some of them here, along with my own notes. New poems coming tomorrow! —AK

Use the newspaper. It’s cheap, they make a new one every day, there’s a huge variety of material in a single paper, and people won’t whine or scold you for “ruining” a book.

Loosen up.

When you’re in blackout poetry mode, don’t read the articles as you normally would. Look at the words as raw material. Toggle between part of one article and part of another, looking for words (and images they suggest) that you can turn into something completely different from the topics of the stories. You’re making fiction out of nonfiction.

Set a time limit. (I usually do them on my lunch break or bus ride.)

Some articles won’t inspire you. Move on.

Don’t read the article first.

“I like to think of blackout poems like those old ‘Word Find’ and ‘Word Search’ puzzles we used to do in elementary school — a field of letters with hidden messages to find,” Kleon writes.

Remember that the poem will be read from left to right and top to bottom.

Share them. You can submit your poems here.

Read more tips online or in Newspaper Blackout→