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Erasure poetry, sometimes known as blackout poetry, is a form of found poetry wherein a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or whites out a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new work from what remains. The new poem probably does not carry the same meaning as the original text. Oftentimes, it conveys quite an opposite meaning.
Erasure poetry is simple. Pick a text to erase, such as a magazine or newspaper story, famous poems, a passage from a novel, or maybe from a text ad. For our call this month, I recommend using no more than a page, and perhaps just a paragraph or two.
I have done blackout poetry by literally taking a black marker to the original. The resulting text looks like those redacted classified documents we sometimes see from the coverage of government proceedings.
Besides creating new meaning in the remaining text, the page can also have a visual look with the gaps. That is not a requirement and at times I think it looks like the poem has holes, so simply making line or stanza breaks for the erased text will suffice.
Doris Cross is thought to be one of the first to employ the erasure technique in poetry with her 1965 “Dictionary Columns.”
There are examples of far more ambitious erasure poetry. Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os is a revision of the first four books of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. I picked up a library copy of Jen Bervin’s Nets which uses Shakespeare's sonnets as primary source texts. The ms of my kin by Janet Holmes uses the poems of Emily Dickinson as a source.
Tracy K. Smith has written several erasure poems, including "Declaration" which is drawn from the Declaration of Independence) in which she shows the places where erasures have occurred with blank spaces. Listen to the poet read her erasure poem and without the page before you with its white space, it sounds like an original work. And of course, it is.Then, read the poem.
We asked that submissions include a note below the title indicating the original text used.
I also included a few short poems of my own as examples of erasure without the blackouts or white spaces using only breaks to indicate the gaps. Here is one example:
THE REASON
(from Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason)
To the happiness of man:
infidelity
not believing,
or disbelieving
professing to believe
what one does not believe
priests and conjurors
are of the same trade
- Kenneth Ronkowitz
( from "God's Grandeur" by Gerard Manley Hopkins)
charged with God
flame out
the ooze of oil
Crushed
trod
seared bleared, smeared
man's smudge and man's smell soil
bare
all this spent
deep down
lights
Oh, morning!
Lianna Wright
AUGUSTINE'S CONCUBINE
(from the story by John Updike
To Carthage I came, where there sang
all around me in my ears
a cauldron of unholy
loves.
I sought what I might love, in love with loving,
Her compliance disturbed.
Her love seemed unreasoning,
demonic in its exemption from fatigue.
In their sleep she had crowded
to the edge of the bed,
indistinct profile,
torchlight shuddered with her breasts
This unseen horizon, of smallness and limit,
she assumed any position, placated any need,
her face gleamed, a Scythian moon of a face.
Grown plump, I wished she would die.
Her lips, pouting, a sudden awareness of study,
come forward and smother, me too, crying.
Concupiscentia. Its innocence disturbed him.
She was a saint, whose name we do not know.
Men would endeavor to hate the flesh because of her.
Charles Michaels
WORDS
(from Barbara A. Holmes's "A Private Woman in Public Spaces")
Our words stitch us
to one another
transcendence or failure
filtered through our rhetoric
words shape
future generations
last longer than our bodies
an indelible imprint of our times
encompass
a glimpse of
cataclysmic shifts
struggles that erupt
the culmination of
moral ideals
bold presence
irony
the moment
embraced
acknowledged
intent
effect
belief
speak to
change and crisis
tumultuous times
discontent
factions
dialog
makes reconciliation possible
the space where a
future can be forged
Frank Kelly
PORTALS
(from “The Enigma of de Chirico” by Chris Glomski on the internet)
Look over his shoulder
to
inhabit
these
portraits
between
inward pulsations
and
the metaphysical.
The problem is
closing
the enigma,
a perfect portal
waiting for
the sea.
Taylor Graham
PRIMOGENITURE IN THE LAND OF MAKE BELIEVE
(William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, Part 2 and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, the gold watch scene)
This watch
was your great-granddaddy's war watch,
Then when he had done his duty,
put it in an ol' coffee can.
your grandfather
was a Marine
facing death.
Winocki,
he paid a visit,
delivering to your infant father, his Dad's gold watch.
This watch
your birthright.
And now, little man, I give
the
watch
Grandfather’s
Father gave it
said, Quentin,
I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire
the reducto absurdum of all human experience
you may remember time
you might forget it
spend all your breath trying to conquer it.
battle
reveals
victory is an illusion of philosophers and fools.
Rob Friedman
PRELUDE
(from the opening paragraphs of The Red Badge of Courage)
Cold passed reluctantly
retiring fogs
began to tremble
liquid mud
a sorrowful blackness
swelled with a tale
a herald in red and gold
small arguing groups
deserted
sat mournfully down
“It’s a lie!”
Rob Miller
Radio Galaxy
(From an article by Briley Lewis)
A hungry black hole,
wrapped in fiery orange
shooting a beam of blue radiation
at near light speed, its angle
puzzling physicists.
Active galactic nuclei,
cores of many other galaxies,
accrete matter and spew powerful
high-energy particles…relativistic jets
4 million light-years away
reclassifies the galaxy a blazar
black hole's jets now pointed
at Earth shifted a "dramatic" degree
across the electromagnetic spectrum;
radio waves to gamma-rays
interact with surrounding gas —
relics of past activity,
a galaxy merger,
jostling orientation
of everything within.
Sterling Warner
A WOMAN’S PLACE
(from a Woman’s Place in Science, Amelia Earhart’s live radio broadcast speech on January 1, 1935)
Women
Released
from drudgery
Pushing buttons
beyond that door
Opportunities
Economic independence
Sociological evolution
Credit those
who toiled
Fine minds
Unite
Technological marvels
Modern flying
An inventor’s dream
Impossibilities
of the past
Changing
The old attitude
More movement
within industry, science
All share rewards
Terri J. Guttilla
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