Poetry

5 times blackout poetry spoke of the pain in Kashmir

blackout poems by muhammad nadeem

 

Blackout poetry falls in the category of ‘found poetry’ in which one focuses on rearranging words to create a different meaning.

Found poetry takes existing texts and refashions them, reorders them, and presents them as poems. Found poetry is often made from newspaper articles, street signs, graffiti, speeches, letters, or even other poems. A pure found poem consists exclusively of outside texts: the words of the poem remain as they were found, with few additions or omissions.

Blackout poetry  is made by using a permanent marker to cross out or eliminate whatever words or images the author sees as unnecessary or irrelevant to the effect he or she is seeking to create. The central idea is to devise a completely new text from previously published words and images, which the reader is free to interpret as he wishes.

This art of poetry is becoming a new trend that is gaining fame on Social Networking Sites like Instagram and tumblr; where blackout poets upload their poems to express their creative self.

Like Kashmir herself, newspapers here mostly reflect conflict, sufferings, death and destruction along with hope, passion and creativity as is reflected in the poems below.

 

1. graveyard flowers

flowers a

hundred

thousand

in unmarked graves

dead

lie buried

in Kashmir

flowers here g

row in

graveyards

 

2. burnt time

widows of pain

in Kashmir

every woman

has a story

of nightmares

her time got burnt

on that frightful night

across old shrine

she lost her dignity

honor

and the life

 

3. 5 words story


the ignorant

needs

no accountability

 

4. fake encounter

a youth

killed

in a ‘fake encounter’

by BSF

‘my son was innocent’

said father.

 

5. injustice

call them

sufferers

of injustice.

killed

hanged

in kingdom of Kashmir

in flames

and we continue

to suffer the stories of suppression shocks us

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