Choose Carefully

Kimberly Burnham
2 min readApr 12, 2022

Found poetry for April 11, 2022 National Poetry Month Poetry Challenge

Words curtesy of Hidden Brain podcast, “All of us make choices all the time, and we may think we’re making those choices freely. But psychologist Eric Johnson says there’s an architecture behind the way choices are presented to us, and this invisible architecture can influence decisions both large and small.”

In blackout poetry the poet sometimes chooses a new title for their poem from words that may or may not appear on the page of text they are working with. Often the poet creates the title of the poem from the title of the page or from some of the early words that appear on the page. In haikus which are a particular kind of poem with three lines of 5, 7, 5 syllables the title gives the poet leeway to give a context or an idea to start off the poem. Traditionally the title in Haikus is short but can be as long as the poem itself if the poet wishes.

Choices black out poetry by Kimberly Burnham, Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

We Move Life’s Choices

buy a, choose a, different
option way presented
shapes what we decide

―Found poems / blackout poetry / erasure haikus by Kimberly Burnham from Hidden Brain podcast https://hiddenbrain.org/podcast/choose-carefully/ from an interview between Shankar Vedantam and Eric Johnson.

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Kimberly Burnham

Writer, Poet, Ekphrastic Writer-in-Residence, Nerve Whisperer, Brain Health Coach, Author of The Traveling Brain: Illuminating Peace Poetry in 5000 Languages.