Winter Writing Lab

Week Five Erasure Poems. The Academy of American poets gives this definition of erasure: Erasure poetry, or blackout poetry, is a form of found poetry wherein a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or otherwise obscures a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new work from what remains.

Like all genres, erasure is partially defined here by what it is not. Erasure is not “traditional poetry,” insofar as poetry has represented the linguistic expression of a single author’s feelings and thoughts. Erasures are not made of one speaker and one listener. Erasure is not pure, and its language is not original. Where there was a whole, erasure asserts a hole. That hole is felt as an absence, even as it becomes a container.

Let’s pretend that reading poetry is like sitting in the bay-window of someone else’s house: We are inside something, and from it we can view the external world, or turn around and look at the house we’re sitting in. Erasure, maybe, is that same window with its curtains drawn, so that only a little crack remains. We can’t see the entire countryside, but we catch a glimpse of a horse, grazing on what might be grass. Or we can see a few hairs of the horse’s tail. And the interior of the house has become a little darker. What is erasure?

Erasure is, principally, the sensation of being between not and is. An aesthetics of felt absence.