Theorizing blackout poetry as a diffractive reading apparatus in teaching of creative writing

This paper argues that blackout poetry can be theorized not only as a familiar technique of found-text composition but as a pedagogical apparatus that moves creative writing pedagogy from reflective interpretation toward diffractive engagement. While creative writing research has often focused on what is written, less attention has been paid to the unwritten, such as erasure, pause, and silence, during the writing process. Drawing on posthuman philosophy and feminist science studies, this study offers a preliminary conceptualization of blackout poetry as a diffractive reading apparatus. The small act of blacking out reconfigures authorship as a material and relational becoming, not only in poetry but across reading-writing practices in which bodies, materials, and texts become with one another through meaning-making. Blacking out engages diffractive reading, enabling texts to be read across one another to produce unexpected meanings. This paper suggests that blackout poetry can cultivate an ethics of response-ability, in which writers learn to respond with, not for, texts, histories, and materialities. Blackout invites writers to sense what is absent as much as what is present. If we want to understand writing, we shall also attend to the unwritten.