Poetry month blackout prompt

National Poetry Writing Month’s Day 11 prompt asked writers on April 11 to make an erasure, or blackout, poem from an existing page of text. (napowrimo.net) The official National Poetry Writing Month site described erasure poetry as a poem made by taking an existing text and removing or blacking out words. A WordPress post by poet V. M. Hosking repeated that prompt the same day and paired it with her own Day 11 entry. (napowrimo.net) (vhosking.wordpress.com) National Poetry Writing Month, often shortened to NaPoWriMo, is the April challenge to write a poem a day for 30 days. Hosking’s blog shows she has been posting daily entries since April 1, 2026, including Day 8, Day 9, and Day 11. (napowrimo.net) (vhosking.wordpress.com 1) (vhosking.wordpress.com 2) (vhosking.wordpress.com 3) The form itself is older than this year’s challenge. The Academy of American Poets defines erasure as a kind of found poetry that creates a new work by obscuring much of an existing text, and the Poetry Foundation lists blackout poetry as the version that visibly covers the rejected words. (poets.org) (poetryfoundation.org) The Day 11 assignment pushed poets toward a hands-on method: start with a favorite book or magazine page, then leave only selected words visible. That turns reading into selection, because the poem’s vocabulary is limited to whatever the source page already contains. (napowrimo.net) (poets.org) The prompt also tapped into a format that already has a broad online and classroom audience. Austin Kleon’s *Newspaper Blackout*, first published in 2010, helped popularize the style, and his companion site invites readers to post their own blackout poems made with marker and newsprint. (austinkleon.com) (newspaperblackout.com) Responses appeared quickly across poetry blogs on April 11. Posts on WordPress sites including *Our Literary Journey*, *Outwardly Respectable*, and *Sunra Rainz* all cited the same Day 11 blackout-poem prompt and published finished poems or images from the exercise. (pluviolover.com) (sycoraxweatherwax.wordpress.com) (sunrarainz.wordpress.com) For National Poetry Writing Month participants, that made April 11 less about drafting from a blank page and more about recomposing a page they already had in hand. The result was a daily prompt built around subtraction: fewer visible words, but a new poem. (napowrimo.net) (poets.org)