I love poetry, and I love sketching. Blackout poetry is the best of both worlds.

This is a page from an old book given to me by a friend, who gave me her blessing to toss it or use it any way I saw fit. I generally have a hard time altering a book in any way because I feel like the work of writing is a little bit sacred, and it always felt like dishonoring the pages to do anything but read them.

The joy of creating with the pages of this book is that I have another copy of the text, and so re-using the pages rather than just throwing away the falling apart copy will breathe new life and creativity into the words on the page. So far, this old book has been used by art students to create mixed media pieces, and then they used pages for drawing paper once they finished those pieces. I jumped in on the doodling and created this work.

Consider that art is coming forth at his command.

Alas!

Happy are we when we create.

It is our duty.