"Newspaper Blackout" is a 2010 collection of found poetry by writer Austin Kleon. It is an anthology of poetry he wrote by taking newspaper articles and using a marker to black out almost all the text, using the remaining words to form free and blank verse poetry.
The poem's themes are bound by the articles they come from (the book doesn't contain the original articles, so the reader has to guess what they were), but there is some consistent images that pop out, many seeming to be about adolescent frustration and absurdity. I perhaps could glean more if I reread the collection more times.
I am split on the value of this book. Some of the poems seem to be written with some keenness. But on the whole, I wonder if found poetry like this has anything especially illuminating about it, or whether it is just cleverness for its own sake. In a world where anyone can go on the internet and put words or images together to arouse momentary interest, its hard for something like this to rise above the flow of words that are saturating us, and give us something special and meaningful. Or maybe I just don't get experimental poetry very well.