Today’s prompt explores erasure (blackout) poetry—taking an existing text and shaping something new from it. It’s part discovery, part destruction, and all about uncovering what lies beneath the surface.
If you’ve never tried it, this is a great place to start—just grab a page from anywhere and begin erasing. I hadn’t done this before, so I kept it short as a first attempt. It turned out to be a lot of fun. The text I used comes from the Internet Archive: The Time Machine by H.G. Wells.
Source text (Introduction from The Time Machine by H.G. Wells):
The Time Traveller was expounding a recondite matter to us. His grey eyes shone and twinkled, and his usually pale face was flushed and animated. The fire burnt brightly, and the soft radiance of the incandescent lights in the lilies of silver caught the bubbles that flashed and passed in our glasses.
Blackout / Erasure Poem:
Time
eyes shone
twinkledpale face
flushed
animatedfire burned
soft radiance
bubbles
flashed
passed
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