Every page of literature hides a poem waiting to be revealed.

Palimpsest treats old books as raw material. Cover the words around the ones that strike you, keep them where they stand, and see the accidental poem that was there all along.

Find the poems in a text Erase your way to a poem Open the Studio →

A poem found in a single sentence

Henry David Thoreau, Walden (1854)

Three ways in

Let the page show youChoose a passage and the workshop reads it for you, pointing out the poems already hiding in it, each marked where it sits on the page.Start finding
One word at a timeTake a poem a step at a time, with the workshop offering words to keep while the rest of the page fades. You decide where it ends.Start erasing
A whole page, your wayA whole page of a real book, every word yours to keep or cover, in the style of ink you choose. Then print it or share it.Open the Studio

Gustave Doré’s engraving for The Raven: a figure on the floor, a raven on a bust above a door.

William Blake’s frontispiece to Songs of Innocence: a piper looking up at a child who floats among the trees.

From the archive

Real books, borrowed from the public domain.

The texts come from Project Gutenberg, cut into short excerpts of about four hundred and fifty words. Search by title or author, choose an excerpt, and the page opens as it was printed. Poetry keeps its lines.

An engraving of a chained book on a lectern. — Once, books were chained to the desk. These ones you may mark up.

Choose a book to begin