Notes on erasures

January 31, 2021 Alina Stefanescu

Extra points for anyone who recognizes this photo from a book that re-visioned the suburbs.

Erasure | əˈrāSHər |: a form 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

I’m posting the links to the craft essays, reviews, and articles without citing them because time is a limited resource, and also, because there is something formally interesting in setting writers’ thoughts on a form in conversation.

SOLMAZ SHARIF: “Erasure means obliteration.
The Latin root of obliteration (ob- against and lit(t)era letter) means the striking out of text.
Poetic erasure means the striking out of text.
Poetic erasure has yet to advance historically.
Historically, the striking out of text is the root of obliterating peoples.”

WILL CORDEIRO: “Kenneth Goldsmith argues that we don't need writers anymore, we need information processors (whether people or machines) who can navigate, rearrange, and index the overflowing cache of digital bits that already exists. For Goldsmith, there's a surfeit in the textual economy, with clickbait and automated systems generating hordes of new gobbledygook on auto-pilot. His solution is for us literati to switch focus from content to context. What matters isn't what a piece says but what we can say about it, he claims. The process of composition is more important than its results. Documents don't need to be glossed and interpreted; they need only to be interpolated and glazed.”

KATY DIDDEN: “I have worked on other erasures—in all cases, like this current project, they were collaborations with visual artists. I worked with my cousin, erasing texts about land in New York, from passages about the Algonquin tribe, to Whitman on the early Dutch presence in Brooklyn, to articles advocating for establishing tent cities on vacant land. These are also meant to reveal forgotten or violent histories in the settling of land and claiming of territory.”

NICK LANTZ: “I realized that the poem would itself be an interrogation, an almost abusive litany of questions. Though the poem of course reads against the backdrop our recent torture scandals and debates, its surreal turns free it of any particular time and place. The interrogator-protagonist who took shape ultimately interested me not for reasons of political ideology but for the way in which he exemplifies how even when we are privy to the most clandestine recesses of human behavior, we are still fundamentally shut out of true knowledge. No matter how many "questions" we ask, we cannot know everything.”

CECILY PARKS: “In an act of ultimate erasure, Dickinson asked that her poems be burned when she died. If you believe that Dickinson’s effacements were a noncompulsory, though not uncomplicated, choice, then the fact that her request was not granted—the poems were published—can seem like a further effacement, an excision made with a very sharp blade.”

SRIKANTH REDDY: “I then deleted language from the book, like a government censor blacking out words in a letter from an internal dissident.”

ISOBEL O’HARE: “I don't conceal the original words and allow them to sit beside the ones I've chosen to highlight, in greyed-out text.”

M. NOURBESE PHILIP: “Physically manipulating the text helped me in the process over the long run: the very fact of physically mutilating the text broke the spell that the completed text has on us. I use the word “mutilate” with great deliberation here since I was deeply aware at the time I worked on Zong! that the intent of the transatlantic slave trade was to mutilate—languages, cultures, people, communities and histories—in the effort of a great capitalist enterprise. And I would argue that erasure is intrinsic to colonial and imperial projects. It’s an erasure that continues up to the present.”

SRIKANTH REDDY: “Erasure is really, to me, a technique that orients one toward questions of word order. You have to find a sequence of words in the source text that works as a sentence of your own. So I’ve come to pay a lot more attention to grammatical construction, as a result of my work with erasure.”

TRAVIS MACDONALD: “The anarchist in me says: there are no rules or boundaries that should not be broken on principle. The author in me, admittedly, bristles at that notion and insists, intuitively, that there is no form without rules to define it. In any case, it is clear to me that if there are rules to this game, they are still being written. That being the case, I would say that the need for attribution lies entirely within the judgment of each erasurist’s individual moral code. In fact, the only rule I can think of worth following would be that the work should understand it’s own code/form and abide by it at all costs.”

DAVID DODD LEE: “….linearly, left to right, though on occasion I broke my own rules, and in such cases I might find a letter I needed to create a word in the line above the one I had just appropriated. This sometimes happened subconsciously. But I failed the erasure test. This became partly what Sky Booths is all about. I wanted so badly to create poems that would stand on their own I cheated.”

SRIKANTH REDDY: “I decided to close up the spaces between words in my erasure as a way of “covering my tracks.” I wanted to erasure the traces of my own erasure, I suppose. On one level, this was just a kind of Borgesian game—I wanted my reader to slowly discover that he or she was reading an erasure as they made their way through the book. But on another level I think there’s a politics behind those sorts of decisions.”

JANET HOLMES: “When my second book came out, appropriating portions of a diary my father wrote in the 1920s, an elder poet came up to me and dismissively said, “I suppose all we need to do now to write poems is to steal someone else’s writing.” It was an expression of the same kind of feeling: real poetry has no sources. That elder poet’s work is largely dependent upon classical mythology, but somehow that does not, in his mind, diminish it. Erasure work brings up questions like this and gives us a perspective from which to discuss them.”

ANGEL GARCIA: “Unlike erasing and black redaction, erasure using blank space allows us to create and converse with our own experiences. Around and inside those blank spaces we can reclaim and reappropriate. In the seemingly simple act of taking back the language of harm, from the language of harm, poets of color are able to make and insert new narra- tives of resilience. In this way, erasure too, becomes a form of code-switching with all its historical connotations. Erasure is language translated and retranslated. It makes meaning new. In this new language—code-switched (but not coded)—we are allowed to resist by expressing dissent. We are able to dismantle and deconstruct the official language. From the legacies of trauma, we can find power. Erasure is an assertion of that power. Erasure is recovery. Erasure is resistance. Erasure is resilience.”

JEANNIE VANASCO: “Why erase the works of other writers? The philosophical answer is that poets, as Wordsworth defines them, are “affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present.” The more practical answer: compared to writing, erasing feels easy.
But I am here to convince you: to erase is to write, style is the consequence of a writer’s omissions, and the writer is always plural.
To erase is to leave something else behind.”