Writing Prompt: Erasure

Before diving into this prompt or running off toward your next erasure, I offer these questions I have found important and illuminating when gauging my own position and intention in relation to a possible project:

What is interesting or compelling to me about erasure as a form? What is disinteresting? What is offensive?

Why am I drawn to this particular text? Who is it for? What does it tell me about myself?

Am I erasing in an attempt to respond to, explore, or better understand the text?

What do I feel about this text? Do I like it, or not? Why do my feelings about this text make me think I have the right to deface it?

In what ways, specifically and in general, is this exercise violent? Who is being hurt? Who is being served?

What position do I occupy in relation to this text, or to its author’s identity? What is my relationship with the text’s history?

What other ways could I approach this text? Have I exhausted other avenues? Is erasure the first idea, or the last resort?

Am I willing to fuck up? Am I willing to practice? Am I willing to waste my time? Am I willing to abandon this project even after completing it?

Am I willing to become frustrated? Am I willing to sit inside this text and let it occupy space within my psyche and my day-to-day thoughts? 

Am I frightened of this work? If so, why? If not, why not?

If you decide to undertake erasure, keep these questions at the fore of your mind. Allow yourself to be nervous. Allow yourself to doubt the work you’re doing even as you’re doing it.

option 1

Choose a text, no fewer than fifteen pages long. The longer the source text the better. You’re going to want options and a wide variety of language to choose from. A shorter text limits the amount of control you have over your poem and often produces a more fragmented result.

As a general rule, avoid erasing poetry. The language of poems is already heightened; making a poem out of a poem, in my experience, rarely leads to something sufficiently divorced from the original. In an erasure, you want the diction at your disposal to be neither too florid nor too jejune. A refrigerator instruction manual might not offer the kind of language you need to imbue your poem with much emotional heft; erasing Nabokov would be cheating.

Choosing a text written in the first person can be helpful. A consistent pronoun can guide your lines when you get lost and act as a foundation that keeps your poem grounded.

Experiment with rules. Do you want to adhere strictly to the order of the words? Do you want to mix them around? Do you want to leave words intact, or create words not originally in the text by using the letters at your disposal? Do you want to create an art object? Set out rules and constraints beforehand. If you decide you want to change them, consider starting over.

Erase a few lines before you start on the whole of your document. That first line will lead the way in helping you find your poem! It tends to dictate what the whole poem will be about.

option 2

Choose and print out at least fifteen pages from a book I found on the streets of Brooklyn last week, George Bridgman’s Constructive Anatomy, published in 1920 and in the public domain.

Retain the word order, and neither add to nor modify the words in the original. You may confine your erasures to the page of the original, or relineate them externally. For an additional challenge, do not allow yourself to use any basic anatomical words (hand, leg, eye, muscle) in your poem, and do not (explicitly) erase a poem about the body.

Using the same pages, repeat the process an additional time