Blackout Poetry With Bob Dylan

Lots of people enjoy making blackout poetry, but in case you don’t know what it is, I’ll explain. You take some type of text (newspapers, old books, etc.) and make poetry by “blacking out” most of the words on the page, only leaving the ones you want. It’s really fun and interesting and often yields surprising results. Lots of people make theirs into art, but I prefer to let the words do the talking.

I’ve been doing some blackout poetry in a book by Bob Dylan called “Chronicles” It’s questionable how much credit one can take for their blackout poetry, so I will err on the safe side: The poems that you see below were written by none other than Bob Dylan.

Another thing you should know is that somehow the use of this work produced surprisingly morbid poetry. Keep in mind that the sentiments you see in them are not my own, but they have been presented to me by coincidence.

I liked underlining interesting words first and then going back and trying to make phrases out of them.

Alone,

Not a muscle quivering,

As if this could save me

Everywhere, bloodlust

Somehow

I could feel the light

As you can see, the poem below deviates quite a bit from what’s on the page. Many of them are modified, but none so much as this one.

Lilac leaves before dawn

In sleep, nothing is missing

Birds sing their sweet, ringing melody

Come back, they croon

Come back

Daydreams

Nothing ever happens here

In my mind,

I’m parachuting from planes,

Living under a fantastic cloud

That’s just not quite real

Victim of my own strange fantasy

The diction near the top of the page has very different connotations to that near the bottom. I found it easier to stick to one section so that it wouldn’t feel detached.

A lonely corpse

Muttering without any logic

Deadly fledgling,

You didn’t have a brain

Mindless human existence

I agonized,

forged identities

Gravity

Didn’t seem important

My altered reality

Swayed the sky

This one is perhaps my favorite. I’ve questioned whether the last phrase has a place in the poem because it adds a whole new dimension to it right at the end but I’ll let you decide for yourself.

I had no ambitions,

I just thought of the unbroken sea

Outside the window

I didn’t know

What the truth of it was

Daylight thrives where

Things fall apart,

Making it all

Pointless

Whatever you were thinking

Seemed to be beaming with

A dark passion

Human nature changed

In the blink of an eye

I went back to the beginning,

Looking for my spirit

I liked the sound of murder

It was like song lyrics,

Even more elegant

Later,

They found him dead

It’s hard to describe

The underworld

Frigid,

a heartless spirit

Prowls the

Frozen city,

Blood and no noise,

Only graveyard silence

How dreams

Fade away

Graveyards aren’t hard to find

In this forgotten place

With morbid fascination

I pictured myself dying

That wonderland

Rattled me

I didn’t like

Golden things

It was only the promise

That lured me

Magnificent gold curls flowing

Eyes flashing

Making it all come alive

I never forgot

For a moment

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Published by EstherYoung26