Sharon Dolin | March/April 2017

NOTES

I am not an erasure poet. I am a reader and teacher of erasure poems. I am fascinated by the art of making poems out of other poems as much as I cut my teeth on, and continue, making my poems by starting from a blank page or jumping off of a quote from someone else to launch me into writing my own poem.

But of course, are any pages really blank? Don’t the ghosts of other poems, songs, jingles, catchphrases cast their shadow over every page upon which we write? I want to write about erasure poems as the most overt use (thievery) by a poet of another poet’s poem.

Let’s keep T.S. Eliot’s famous dictum in mind—not just the often-paraphrased first two sentences—in thinking about erasure poetry as creative thievery:

Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion.¹

I came to Oulipo over ten years ago: the set of procedures invented and popularized by the French group. Think of Georges Perec deliberately writing the novel La Disparation without the letter e. I always chuckle over the fact that his name contains four es. Or imagine the use of N + 7 to create new poems out of other poems: the process of replacing each noun in a poem by locating it in a dictionary and then counting to the seventh noun. Granted, there’s always a bit of cheating involved. Replacement, however, which has an arbitrary element within it, is not the same thing as erasure. Replacement is subtraction followed by addition while erasure is subtraction alone. Or, rather, erasure is selection from a very limited group of words in the strict order in which they are found in an already existing poem or other piece of text in order to create a new [w]hole.

As Travis Macdonald describes, in his informative essay, “A Brief History of Erasure Poetics,” “[A] new form of reductive poetics has emerged, concerning itself with the deliberate removal (or covering over) of words on the page rather than their traditionally direct application thereto.”²

I first encountered the idea of the erasure book in an art bookstore in SoHo, about twenty years ago, when I happened upon Tom Phillips’s justly famous A Humument³ (erased from the 19^th-century obscure novel A Human Document, by W. H. Mallock). What an incredible made thing. Somehow the painter and the constructivist poet in him merged to create a masterpiece about the adventures of a character named toge (from “together”). Why do I admire the making of something from something else: the recycling of creativity into a different creativity? Is it the same kind of pleasure I derive from finding new uses for old things? Or is it because we are so flooded by texts, we begin to wonder, is it necessary to create any more?

At some point I also got my hands on Ronald Johnson’s Radi os,⁴ his book-length erasure of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. If you’re going to erase a poet, why not use one of the greats. Not as a Bloomian Oedipal overcoming, but because the language will be so rich and varied, and if the original (host text) is removed by several centuries, then the erasure poet has an opportunity to make something boldly contemporary from the work.

Erasures: What other art form satisfies the urge to destroy and create at the same time.

“Why write erasure poems?” an apprentice poet at the 92^nd Street Y asked me recently.

My first answer was: because they’re fun, at which several students nodded their heads in assent. They’re also difficult, like a language puzzle. And they are an alternative to starting with the blank page. Here, a poet begins with a page of text and seeks to carve a poem from it. I have always felt that poetry is akin to sculpture. I think here of Pound’s description of Gautier-Brzeska and of Michelangelo who carved away at a piece of stone in order to reveal the figure within it: “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.” What if that stone block is an already written poem, a sonnet, say, by Shakespeare? The more language- and image-dense the better. Then it becomes the poet’s job to chip away at the words, perhaps leaving letters intact across one or more words to form new words. Erasure poems celebrate the richness of the English language, the way words lie buried inside of other words until they are unearthed by the erasure poet.

Erasure poetry also returns us to the language games we played as children (How many words can you make out of the letters in the word “kaleidoscope”?) Writing poems may be a serious business, but if you’re not also having fun, you’ve lost something important. Every vital art form always contains the element of play. As Huizinga writes in his chapter on “Play and Poetry” in Homo Ludens, “[T]he function of the poet still remains fixed in the play-sphere where it was born. Poiesis, in fact, is a play-function.”⁵ Perhaps this is the most important reason to introduce poetry students to such techniques as erasure poetry. They may not “write” their best poems that way, but the process will remind them to keep alive the element of play in their creative process.

“Are erasure poems found poems?” another student wanted to know. My immediate answer was “No.” A found poem pulls language from an extra-literary context into the context of the poem. There is no construction involved, just a replacement of the language. Like Duchamp’s toilet seat, found poetry is conceptual. An erasure poem, on the other hand, is more akin to another childhood art project called scratch art, where a layer of black paint covers over a colorful surface and the child artist scratches away the black paint in order to create her own artwork. The more elaborate the palette and design beneath the black coating, the more elaborate the scratch art can be. This is an imperfect analogy, of course. For erasure poetry, a poet has a limited palette of words, or letters, in a particular order on particular lines. S/he then pulls from that palette a picture that is unique to that poet’s sensibility.

Erasures sing the praise of the gap. The white space. They remind us of the said as well as the unsaid. If prose is about exploring the potential of what words can say, poetry is an exploration into unsaying. A frame around the impossible to say, inexpressible, beyond language. The ineffable. Only poems use language to gesture beyond themselves. And erasures, by their very constitution, do just that.

I erase, therefore I err. Erasure. Erasure. Err. Not as error or mistake but as errant. To wander. To stray. Erasures stray from or within their host poems.

If all lyric poems are, to some extent, self-portraits, then erasure poems are no different. In fact, it startled and delighted my students to see how different their erasures from the same text were. How much the erasure spoke with the particular voice of the erasure poet using the words (or composite letters) of an other. But of course, we’re always writing with the words of others. Writing is always a selection from an active or passive word horde that belongs to all of its speakers. A Native English college-educated speaker knows approximately “17,000 word families”⁶ according to one study and between 20,000–35,000, according to another.⁷ That is a daunting number of words to choose from. And, if you use the dictionary or a thesaurus, you have thousands more at your disposal. According to the Global Language Monitor, English, as of January 1, 2014, has 1,025,109.8 words.⁸

So what if you are confronted with a puzzle, a word game, in which you have to construct a poem out of 124 words (or fewer since there are repeated words): the sum total in Olena Kalytiak Davis’s poem “SONNET (motion)”? That is the assignment I set my class as we were reading through her book. Poets are parasitic creatures. We feed on other poems. And Kalytiak Davis is a voracious poetry feeder. Her echoes and quotations range from Shakespeare to Hopkins to Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. As she casually admits in her single Note(s) “A lot of this stuff was stolen from a lot of other stuff—with respect and apologies.” As T.S. Eliot famously said of great poets, they steal instead of borrowing.

So Kalytiak Davis’s poems seemed ripe for the erasing, perhaps the sneakiest form of homage there is. I tried this process with a private poetry workshop as well as with my recent class at the Y. Because I have been working with the private group for years, the results seemed the strongest and the most revelatory of the possible range of writing a single sonnet can inspire through erasure. Here’s the Kalytiak Davis poem as erased by several of my students:

ERASURE OF
            Sonnet (motion) by Olena Kalytiak Davis

i saw you spin: pause once pause twice pause t(h)rice;
too fast you went for me to catch my love,
from that from then was dizzy as a dove
dipping low as sister hawk after (her) mice.

heads up! head down to draw upon that straw:
i’m sorry love, these teeth were in my mouth
before we met before I knew that south
could be as warm as italy or dawn.

right now, who needs prepare to subjugate?!
i give you my self-portrait: you say: look:
it’s fawn meets wolf. it’s sex meets book.
it’s love, love, it’s all, it’s not too late:

then push and pull took on “self loved self hate”:
dead on. my god. i won. you fucked me straight.⁹

The quick, acerbic humor of this erasure poem captures some of the spirit of this poet’s work. By titling it “ERASURE OF,” the poet seems to be implying that love without knowledge of the self amounts to a kind of erasure of the self and the erasure enacts that harsh truth. I admire the minimalism of this poem. So many times (myself included), poets think they need to leave in words from every line in order to honor the source poem.

Traditionally (though erasures might feel antitraditional), we think of erasures as those poems that maintain the trace of the source text, if only by preserving the spacing. If for instance, you go to Wave Poetry’s erasure site,¹⁰ you will have the option of erasing a random fifty percent of a given text, and then repeating that process as many times as you wish, or choosing which words you would like to erase, and the disposition of the words on the page remains the same while the erased words vanish. But not everyone chooses to stop there.

Here is an erasure of the same sonnet by a different student who was ingenious enough to erase the title to create her own:

     mo on

I saw you  in     ice     ice
too fast you went

dipping low   t i

   d   e
 love
be                       new
be a   m

right now
i           say look
   fawn     l       ook
it’s not too late

   push and pull   on
                        on   go   on¹¹

This second erasure doesn’t attempt to preserve the ghost of the original and approximates the number of spaces between letters on the line. Without the label “erasure poem,” a reader might come upon this poem and think the poet is invoking some of the linear tricks of Cummings. And since the poem exhorts the lover to slow down, the slow blur of a word like “l   ook” makes formal and emotional sense. Also, while erasure is usually considered to be the art of subtraction, this poet has added, as in created, new words that were in the host poem as mere potential: “tide” and “beam” arise out of my student’s ingenious erasure of other letters.

Here’s one more erasure by a student, who chose to erase any sign of this poem as an erasure, other than the title:

Erasure of Olena Kalytiak Davis’s
“Sonnet (motion)”

spin us twice
fast catch
dizzy
low as mice

to straw

we met
i knew

            self
            wolf

            pull
            god on tight¹²

I particularly love the tight dizziness of these short lines and the way the host poem’s declamatory boast, “you fucked me straight,” is turned into an invocation to spiritual union: “pull / god on tight,” a complete tonal reversal of what union means for the source sonnet, yet there is the pleasure that these words literally inhere in the source poem. When I asked the poet why she chose this version and not one with the ghost of the original, she said: “I had other versions of this. I went with this one because it seemed to pull away and become its own thing and a coherent whole. Everything else I tried seemed like a fragment.”

Of course, this poet values “a coherent whole,” which may not be everyone’s aesthetic predilection. In fact, I would venture to say that erasure poets are interested in the lacunae that open up when something is deliberately left out, the way that fragments can form a different kind of [w]hole. Here I think of Ann Lauterbach’s praise of “the whole fragment,”¹³ which I hesitate to say may now be so much a part of our cultural zeitgeist that I am in danger of stating the obvious. In other words, perhaps what Eliot condemns in the bad poet as “no cohesion” is exactly what the contemporary erasure poet is after.

Moreover, what is the effect of having erased all traces of the source poem? Isn’t part of the delight of reading erasure poems in seeing the way the erasure poet deleted words and then picked out letters to form new words?

I think of Jen Bervin’s astounding classic, Nets, the title itself ghosted from Shakespeare’s Sonnets. The pleasure for me is definitely increased by seeing the way Bervin plucked words from the original sonnets, while the ghost of the source text remains legible on the page. Do erasure poems, then, rely upon the source text? Or is it similar to allusion, where knowing the source (or seeing it) deepens the experience? Is erasure nothing more than an exercise? Or can strong poems emerge from this process?

Here are Sonnets 63 and 64. Keep in mind that NETS appeared in 2004, just three years after 9/11.

                        63

   Against my love shall be, as I am now,
   With Time’s injurious hand crushed and o’er-worn;
   When hours have drained his Dolin and filled his brow
4  With lines and wrinkles; when his youthful morn
   Hath travelled on to age’s steepy night,
   And all those beauties whereof now he’s king
   Are vanishing or vanished out of sight,
8   Stealing away the treasure of his spring;
   For such a time do I now fortify
   Against confounding age’s cruel knife,
   That he shall never cut from memory
12  My sweet love’s beauty, though my lover’s life:
     His beauty shall in these black lines be seen,
     And they shall live, and he in them still green.

Erased Sonnet 63 seems to wrestle with the problem all erasures may have: Is the self, is the distinctive “I” still there? While the image of the net and what is caught up in it is a vivid three-dimensional one for the process of erasure as a pulling out and highlighting of certain words and letting others (most, in this case) recede, does the remaining catch (as of metaphorical fish) contain enough? How much should I read the black lines against the faded source text? If the Shakespeare sonnet deals with mortality and “age’s cruel knife,” and through a declaration, an act of “will,” these “black lines” are meant to keep the beloved young (“green”), Bervin’s response is au contraire. She becomes the beloved who is drowning or “vanishing or vanished.” You can’t keep me here through language, she seems to say. The black lines begin to acquire the feeling of a carved relief; they need the ghosted words of the host sonnet in order to resonate as palpable absence.

                                    64

  When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced
   The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;
   When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed
4  And brass eternal, slave to mortal rage;
   When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
   Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
   And the firm soil win of the watery main,
8  Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
   When I have seen such interchange of state,
   Or state itself confounded to decay;
   Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate—
12  That Time will come and take my love away.
   This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
    But weep to have that which it fears to lose.¹⁴

There is such poignancy in these lines. The spareness, the sparseness, of words is part of the point. I admire Bervin’s careful erasure, leaving only the sense of loss against the palimpsest of Shakespeare’s words. Yes, the towers are there in the original sonnet; it is not a word composed of letters from neighboring words. And what more is there to say? Or, rather, at barely three years removed, what more could one say than to lament the loss? Here, all the white space, all the veiled language, is a powerful, visual enactment of that loss. In fact, the next “Net,” Sonnet 68, erases all but these words: map /// the / shorn away //////map /what beauty was”: a woeful reenactment of the pre- and post-9/11 world made all the more moving by the erased landscape of the page.

Bervin’s NETS do function as a sequence and I do them a disservice by quoting only two in their fully erased form. But the terrain of erasure poetry has been growing, and I want to move on to other erasure strategies.

Mary Ruefle’s diminutive book, A Little White Shadow,¹⁵ would be difficult for me to quote from because Ruefle has taken Wite-Out to the pages of a tiny, 19^th-century book “[p]ublished for the Benefit of a Summer Home for Working Girls.” I can only hope to create the approximation of a page.

the                         dead.

 

                                borrow so little from
                                                   the past

 

 

                                 as if they were alive, ¹⁶

But even as I attempt to recreate the page, it feels wrong. The words that are not erased, the ones Ruefle chose, stand out against the Wite-Out, which feels like a Robert Ryman white-on-white painting. The background paper upon which the letters sit is an aged brown. The experience of reading the words themselves surrounded by luminous, hand-scored stripes of Wite-Out is not reproducible here. Quoting makes the words feel more trivial, while seated on the page, the words are in conversation with their past. The poet never Wites-Out the title of the book, A Little White Shadow, which sits atop each page, reminding the reader that what is missing is palpable, shadowing the remaining lines. Ruefle’s erasure may have more in common with artist’s books, like A Humiment, than with poetry books.

Just as poets erase with Wite-Out, they also sometimes erase by blacking out text. One book-length work by Austin Kleon has taken pages of The New York Times and made an entire book of what he refers to as “newspaper blackout poems.” In his appendix, giving tips and instructions on how to do so he writes, “The poet William Carlos Williams said it was difficult to get the news from poems, but I’ve found it’s not all that hard to get poems from the news.”¹⁷ Now I’m not sure these are the only kinds of poems you want to “write,” and I often found these erasures amusing to read once, but a bit pedestrian. Poetry is not only short phrases with most of the connectives left out. Poetry is as much about tone and rhythm and voice and image. “sing / to / me / o /// m / u s e // i / have /// the / time, // and / the / spot,” the first erasure “poem” in the book, is hardly worth more than a smile and nod to the tradition of invoking the muses at the start of an epic journey, which the following newspaper erasures, glib and what I might call “drive-thru poetry,” are glaringly not. There may be limits to what one can do with erasures. And I would never suggest to poets that they devote themselves to making erasure poems exclusively.

Instead, I exhort poets to become like Felix the Cat, the cartoon character I grew up watching, who has a magic bag of tricks from which he can pull countless, miraculous items or which he can transform in an instant into whatever his mind conjures up. Erasure should only be one of many, many formal strategies to keep in your little bag of tricks.

I can only begin to gesture at the book-length works of erasure poems that have recently appeared. Most notable are: The Ground I Stand on Is NOT my ground, by Collier Nogues, with its erasures of military documents related to the occupation of Okinawa;¹⁸ Janet Holmes’s  The Ms of My Kin¹⁹ (from the erasure of The Poems of Emily Dickinson), which contains erasure poems of Emily Dickinson’s poems from 1861–62, the first two years of the Civil War; David Dodd Lee’s Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere: The Ashbery Erasure Poems,²⁰ all culled from John Ashbery’s long poem Flow Chart; Matthea Harvey’s Of Lamb,²¹ diminutive poems erased from a Charles Lamb biography; and Voyager²² by Srinkanth Reddy, his three-times erasure of Kurt Waldheim’s autobiography.

The most ambitious and impressive recent erasure book (and there does seem to be a tendency to create whole books of erasure poems) is Dan Beachy-Quick’s Shields & Shards & Stitches & Songs. This chapbook, more than any other erasure book I know, puts the process of erasure at its foreground. Beachy-Quick writes seven “Shields”: seven small, dense, thickly consonantal lyrics, which he then erases to form “Shards,” which he then erases again to form “Stitches,” and from those few remaining words or single letters, he heals them into “Songs.” What an amazing conceptual project! I only wish he had structured the book so that each progression from “Shield” to “Shard” to “Stitches” to “Song” followed each other, instead of separating each category of poem into discrete sections, which seems to undercut the power of the sculptural process he has so clearly undertaken: to chisel down his own poems into other poems twice over and then build new ones out of their remains. Here’s the final sequence:

The question arises: Do the “Shard” and “Stitch” poems work as freestanding poems? Or do they require the context of this erasure project, even its conceptual underpinnings provided on the back cover, presumably by the poet himself:

Shards are what remain of shields, fragment words relict from the first poem. Shards become stitches, barest suture of meaning made only from what language in the shard remains, smallest chant of healing the wound must utter itself. Last, built upon the stitches, keeping intact what letters and words there remain, seven songs to replace seven shields.

There is something reparative about this project. Not that every erasure needs to be woven again into song, yet doing so seems to move forward the very technique of erasure poetry. Beachy-Quick also chose to erase his own poems, another exceptional thing to do.

Could erasure be used as a technique for revision? Here’s an idea that I intend to try, as well as suggest to my students: Take out a failed or stuck poem and perform an erasure upon it. Then perform an erasure upon the erasure. Then write other language back in. Stop at any point in this process when you feel you have a w/hole poem.

I am wondering whether Beachy-Quick’s beautifully lyrical descriptions of his “Stitches” (the erasure of an erasure) “the smallest chant of healing the wound must utter itself,” could stand for the process of erasure itself. The erasure creates a wound that it must utter and the work of piecing together the fragments of phonemes and words, “the barest suture of meaning,” is what we as writers and readers of erasure poems hope to do.

What one chooses to erase says as much about the erasure poet as what she does with it. One of my students who is fluent in Spanish chose to erase a Pablo Neruda sonnet in translation:

Wave

When I die, I want your hands on my eyes:
I want the light and wheat of your beloved hands
to pass their freshness over me once more:
I want to feel the softness that changed my destiny.

I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep.
I want your ears still to hear the wind, I want you
 to sniff the sea’s aroma that we loved together,
to continue to walk on the sand we walk on.

I want what I love to continue to live,
and you whom I love and sang above everything else
to continue to flourish, full-flowered:

so that you can reach everything my love directs you to,
so that my shadow can travel along in your hair,
so that everything can learn the reason for my song.²⁷

This erasure poem is a pared-down love song, a bit less elegiac in tone than the Neruda host poem, which talks about dying. It reminds me of an early imagist lyric by H.D., and it conveys something of this contemporary poet’s belief that it is possible to write a love poem that is neither cynical nor ironic. How refreshing.

What struck me and my students about their erasure poems was how distinct each of them was from each other, and yet how much in keeping with that particular poet’s aesthetic, as though the erasure process itself was Rorschachian. It put me in mind of something Rosemary Waldrop said to me years ago, when we were both, in different ways, writing about our mothers, and I’m paraphrasing: Your subject matter chooses you. The form in which you deal with it is your choice.²⁸

Here’s one more erasure of the same Kalytiak Davis sonnet by a student, who plucked out more letters than words in the order in which she found them in order to create a minimalist poem all her own. She does not preserve the source poem’s lineation. Is this cheating? Perhaps. But thievery and cheating (as in breaking the rules of a supposed form) seem to partner here to yield a new poem. And isn’t that the goal? At a certain point, I care less about nomenclature (is this still an erasure poem?) and more about the quality of play that has decreated and created anew.

MOTIONLESS

in eons
ice to cloven dip
a drawn out yawn

gowned, prep myself
in tulle

love fate, on dit²⁹

This poet went the farthest in her process of demolition/creation. She exhibits her interest in sparseness, even in a certain degree of opacity (how does one construe “ice to cloven dip”?), reminiscent of some of Rae Armantrout’s poetry. The drollery of this poet’s voice comes through as well, in her decision to use a French expression to end the poem.

Erasure itself may be a formal choice and what you choose to erase becomes part of that choice as well as whether or not you choose to foreground or erase your procedure of erasure altogether. To erase also harbors the word “rase,” as in to pull down some structures of meaning. Returning to Eliot and updating him for the 21^st century, the question remains: When someone is creating or reading an erasure poem, has the erasure merely pulled down structures or has it created a “[w]hole of feeling [however fragmented] which is unique”?³⁰

Sharon Dolin’s sixth book, Manual for Living, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 2016. Her previous books include Serious Pink (Marsh Hawk Press, 2015 reissue), Whirlwind (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), and Burn and Dodge (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), which won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. She has taught at the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y for 20 years and currently directs the international workshop Writing About Art in Barcelona: www.sharondolin.com/barcelona-workshops/

Notes

1. T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (Faber & Faber, 1920; rep. 1997), p. 125, my emphasis.
2. Travis Macdonald, “A Brief History of Erasure Poetics,” Jacket 38. 2009. http://jacketmagazine.com/38/macdonald-erasure.shtml
3. Tom Phillips. A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel. 4^th edition. Thames & Hudson. 1980. Phillips saw this book as a work-in-progress and for years was busily creating alternative pages. One version of it may be found here: https://tactileword.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/phillips1.pdf
4. Ronald Johnson, RADI OS (Flood Editions, 2005).
5. J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture (Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1949), p. 156.
6. Andreea Cervatiuc. “ESL Vocabulary Acquisition: Target and Approach.” The Internet TESL Journal. http://iteslj.org/Articles/Cervatiuc-VocabularyAcquisition.html
7. R.L.G. “Vocabulary Size: Lexical Facts.” The Economist. May 29, 2013. http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2013/05/vocabulary-size
8. Global Language Monitor. http://www.languagemonitor.com/number-of-words/number-of-words-in-the-english-language-1008879/
9. Erasure by Ellen Wright of Olena Kalytiak Davis, “SONNET (motion),” The Poem She Didn’t Write and Other Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 2014), 56. Used by permission of the author.
10. http://erasures.wavepoetry.com/
11. Erasure by J. Blake. Used by permission of the author.
12. Erasure by Gwen North Reiss. Used by permission of the author.
13. See Ann Lauterbach, “As (It) Is: Toward a Poetics of the Whole Fragment,” The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience (Viking, 2005), 40-45. Also in American Women Poets in the 21^st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, ed. Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr (Wesleyan University Press, 2002), pp. 363–67.
14. Jen Bervin, NETS (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004).
15. Mary Ruefle, A Little White Shadow (Wave Books, 2006).
16. Ibid., 9.
17. Austin Kleon, Newspaper Blackout. (Harper Perennial, 2010), 157. You can see samples of his work here: http://newspaperblackout.com/.
18. Collier Nogues, The Ground I Stand on Is NOT my ground. Drunken Boat Media, 2015. There is also a digital site for this book which allows the reader to see the lines that were erased: http://thegroundistandon.com/
19. Janet Holmes, THE MS OF MY KIN. Exeter, GB: Shearman Books, 2009.
20. David Dodd Lee, Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere: The Ashbery Erasure Poems. BlazeVOX, 2010.
21. Matthea Harvey, Of Lamb. Illustrated by Amy Jean Porter. McSweeney’s, 2011.
22. Matthea Harvey, Of Lamb. Illustrated by Amy Jean Porter. McSweeney’s, 2011.
23. Dan Beachy-Quick, Shields & Shards & Stitches & Songs. Omnidawn, 2015 (used by permission of the publisher), p. 15.
24. Ibid., p. 23.
25. Ibid., p. 31.
26. Ibid., p. 39.
27. Elizabeth Lara, erasure of Pablo Neruda, Sonnet LXXXIX, 100 Love Sonnets / Cien sonetos de amor. Trans. by Stephen Tapscott. Reissued, University of Texas Press, 1986, p. 189. Used by permission of the author.
28. Here is a similar statement in an essay Waldrop wrote, in the context of her exploration of collage: “I realized that subject matter is not something to worry about. Your concerns and obsessions will surface no matter what you do. This frees you to work on form, which is all one can work on consciously.” http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/waldropr/thinking.html
29. Erasure by Linda Umans. Used by permission of the author.
30. Eliot, my brackets.