Poets have been constructing new work by selectively redacting others’ texts for decades, but Instagram and our political moment have spotlit this startling technique
Weapon of war, language-game, act of restorative justice, conversation – erasure poetry can play all these parts and more. A branch of found poetry, erasure poetry starts from an existent document, obliterating parts of it to leave a new, slimmer text. While this type of verse is seeing a surge in popularity due to its “instagrammable” nature, cut-up and collage techniques have been around since the mid-20th century. And parody, the mockery of another poem by borrowing words and ideas and giving them a comic twist, must have existed long before poems were even written down.
There’s no one way to create an erasure poem. The only “rule” is that words must be taken away from a pre-existing text, rather than written as new. American poet Erin Dorney defined six different kinds of erasure poetry in a 2018 blogpost. “Crossouts”, where sections of newspaper articles or documents to make a poem out of the remaining text, are probably the best-known type, popularised by Austin Kleon’s Newspaper Blackout Poems. Other authors have been more creative in how they block out text, using things such as sand and flowers to obliterate the chosen passages. An Instagram poem Dorney quotes, by Jaime Mortara, blacks out all the surrounding text, ending up with “my brain / is / a / stunning / joke”. Many erasure poems offer such cryptic snatches of wisdom, wry quips given significance by their spotlighting.
Continue reading...