Erasure Poetry

Erasure poetry is a form of found poetry created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem. The results can be allowed to stand in situ or they can be arranged into lines and/or stanzas.

Here is a nonce example using text from the November 2003 version of the English Wikipedia Main Page:

complete

and free

we started

and are

visit

experiment

you can

right now

Several contemporary writer/artists have used this form to good effect. Doris Cross appears to have been among the earliest to utilize this technique, beginning in 1965 with her "Dictionary Columns" book art. d.a. levy also worked in this mode at about the same time. Ronald Johnson's Radi Os is a long poem deconstructed from the text of Milton's Paradise Lost. Tom Phillips' A Humument is a major work of book art and found poetry deconstructed from a Victorian novel. Similarly, Jesse Glass' Mans Wows (1981), is a series of poems and performance pieces mined from John George Hohman's book of charms and healings Pow Wows, or The Long Lost Friend. Jen Bervin's Nets is an erasure of Shakespeare's sonnets. Janet Holmes's The ms of my kin (2009) erases the poems of Emily Dickinson written in 1861-62, the first few years of the Civil War, to discuss the more contemporary Iraq War. Likewise, Nick Flynn's "Seven Testimonies (redacted)" in The Captain Asks a Show of Hands, is an erasure of the testimonies from prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Matthea Harvey's Of Lamb is a book-length erasure of a biography of Charles Lamb. Srikanth Reddy's Voyager is another book-length erasure, of Kurt Waldheim's autobiography.