Erasure poem of "Instruction and Resistance" from Mark Doty's The Art of Description
To close out the first semester of my honors project in Creative Writing, my thesis advisor suggested that I attempt an erasure poem. Erasure poetry, or blackout poetry, involves taking any piece of writing and “blacking out” most of the text to create a poem of the leftover words. Because it does not require the mental burden of invention, my advisor thought it may be a more approachable task at this point in the semester.
Truthfully, creating an erasure poem is no less laborious than creating any other kind of poem. But it is a different kind of labor—a labor of selecting and trimming, of choosing what to keep and what to carve away. Each text is filled simultaneously with immense possibility and intense restriction. There are hundreds of words to choose from, but you do not have the power to reorder them, to change their number or tense, to make additions. You only have the power of removal.
In a meeting with a professor, she explained that one of the great powers of blackout poetry is its ability to place control in the hands of the marginalized. It allows poets to strip language from those who have always had a voice, to manipulate the words of their oppressor, to insist upon being heard. It allows for the interrogation of structures that use language as a tool of oppression.
Excerpt from an erasure poem of my honors project proposal
Performing an erasure of your own writing is both exciting and disorienting. It requires you to abandon your own intentions and to eclipse your own voice. My initial assignment was to make an erasure poem from the project proposal I submitted when I applied to the honors program. Since then, I have created erasure poems from my old journal entries and academic papers. The more boring the piece is, the more fascinating it becomes to extract a poem from it.
On the other hand, much of the power of erasure poetry comes from the conversation that emerges between the initial text and the poem that it produces, which requires a level of intentionality when choosing your source. For this reason, most of the erasure poems I’ve created are not particularly noteworthy or compelling. But they have been a helpful exercise in creativity. The options on the page do not always align with the ideas in my head, which means that I have to use language in ways that I normally wouldn’t. And when I begin with a text written by someone else, I have immediate access to their lexicon, which is often strikingly different from mine. The words I choose for the final blackout poem are often words that I would never have reached for, had I started with a blank page.
Erasure poem of an academic essay entitled "Poetic Qualities in Climate Fiction"
One of the things I find most valuable about erasure poetry is that anyone can do it. Anyone can write poems, of course, but erasure poetry is uniquely accessible because the language has already been written for you. Your only task is to trim the fat from whichever words compel you, and you are left with proof that art can be found wherever we choose to excavate it.