Erasure

And now for today’s (optional) prompt! Erasure poetry — also known as blackout poetry — is written by taking an existing text and erasing or blacking out individual words. Here’s a great explainer with examples, and you’ll find another here. Some folks have written whole books of erasures/blackouts, including Chase Berggrun’s R E D (which is based on Dracula), Jen Bervin’s Nets (which is based on Shakespeare’s sonnets), and what is one of the grand-daddies of erasures as a form, Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (which is based on Paradise Lost). Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own erasure/blackout poem. You could use a page from a favorite book, a magazine, what have you. It can be especially fun to play with a book you don’t know, particularly one that deals with an unfamiliar topic. If you’d like to go that route, maybe you’ll find something of interest in the thousands of scanned books at the Internet Archive? Feel free to maintain the whitespace of the original text (as is traditional for erasures/blackouts . . . if anything can be called traditional about them) or to pluck words/phrases from your chosen source material and rearrange them.

Today’s prompt was very intriguing. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the time to really try out this technique properly. The three texts I had a go at ’erasing’ were The Anaxiamander Fragment, the intro to Plato’s Republic and the start of the Blake essay on the French revolution. If I have time, I’ll try come back and have a proper go at this.

The place             which                 is,
emerges,                                 into this (as into the
same)                     exigence (brook)               enjoining
and                   belong
disjoining                              of time's coming into its
own.

I went down
                                    I wanted to watch the festival,
                                          the first time
                       Athenians struck me as excellent,

             watched the festival
                                                        spotted by
Polemarchus
      wait for him.
‘Polemarchus says you are to wait.’

                        ‘coming along behind you. Wait for him.’
‘We will,’


             procession, apparently.

Dear Sir, You are pleased
                                       in France.
                                           sentiments
                                 for
little
                                                 honour

                                                  this letter. My
errors, if any, are my own.


                  wish that France may
          rational liberty,

                                                          act,