blackout poems by muhammad nadeem
Blackout poetry falls in the category of ‘found poetry’ in which one focuses on rearranging words to create a different meaning.
Found poetry takes existing texts and refashions them, reorders them, and presents them as poems. Found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems. A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions.
Blackout poetry is made by using a permanent marker to cross out or eliminate whatever words or images the author sees as unnecessary or irrelevant to the effect he or she is 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.
This art of poetry is becoming a new trend that is gaining fame on Social Networking Sites like Instagram and tumblr; where blackout poets upload their poems to express their creative self.
Like Kashmir herself, newspapers here mostly reflect conflict, sufferings, death and destruction along with hope, passion and creativity as is reflected in the poems below.
1. graveyard flowers
flowers a
hundred
thousand
in unmarked graves
dead
lie buried
in Kashmir
flowers here g
row in
graveyards
2. burnt time
widows of pain
in Kashmir
every woman
has a story
of nightmares
her time got burnt
on that frightful night
across old shrine
she lost her dignity
honor
and the life
3. 5 words story
the ignorant
needs
no accountability
4. fake encounter
a youth
killed
in a ‘fake encounter’
by BSF
‘my son was innocent’
said father.
5. injustice
call them
sufferers
of injustice.
killed
hanged
in kingdom of Kashmir
in flames
and we continue
to suffer the stories of suppression shocks us
