Show HN: A tool for creating blackout poetry
12 comments
·April 5, 2025mkremins
Really cool! I also made some blackout poetry tools back in like 2019, maybe of interest… https://mkremins.github.io/blackout/interactive
tekknolagi
Hah, nice. I made this crappy version for a friend to use in a joke: https://bernsteinbear.com/redactor/
Rendello
My first recursive-decent parser was for this Discord bot that let people chain these ridiculous text transformations with pipes like in Unix, so:
> What {you’re refering|uwu|mock} to as {Linux|serif}, is in fact, {GNU/Linux|redact} | clap
Became:
> What <clap> uR <clap> rEfEwiNg <clap> to <clap> as <clap> *Linux*, <clap> is <clap> in <clap> fact, <clap> [REDACTED]
(HN strips all the fun Unicode stuff, so <clap> is the emoji, Linux is in bold serif, and redacted is the black bar.)
Terrible, I know, but such is the nature of the best chat bots. We used to do a lot of CTFs so I always wanted to be able to connect it to CyberChef and be able to use those functions. Nowadays an LLM could do most of it and more, I suppose.
ray__
This is really cool! Any tips for finding poems hidden in a large block of text?
It reminds me of the poem composed from one of Trump's tweets: "O, the Pelican. so smoothly doth he crest. a wind god!" There are lots of other examples on r/othepelican.
bobbiechen
(Creator here) It's something I'd like to spend more time on! I didn't have a good time with LLM prompting but I think maybe something deterministic similar to Nutrimatic https://nutrimatic.org/2024/ might produce better results.
quuxplusone
Sounds similar (but not identical) to the task of finding accidental haikus — for which people have totally written bots. For example,
scottmf
Seems like a use case for language models.
justonceokay
No one expected that in the future we would be reading AI generated poetry to cats in strollers.
mc3301
I thought blackout poetry was when you write poetry while in a blackout state and can't remember it the next day.
Sweet! I love erasure (aka blackout) poetry.
If anyone want to see some high quality examples of the form, check out:
- O Mission Repo, by Travis McDonald, an erasure of the 9/11 Comission Report
- A Humument, by Tom Phillips, an erasure of A Human Document, a victorian novel of manners; A Humument is unusual in that each page is beautifully and thematically hand painted over by Philips, not just blacked out or erased as is more typical of the form.
- Radi Os, by Ronald Johnson, an erasure of Paradise Lost