Erasure
Quick answer: Erasure poetry carves a new poem out of an existing text by deleting most of it. Learn the history of erasure and blackout poetry and how to make your own.
Erasure works by subtraction. You take an existing text, a novel page, a legal document, a newspaper article, and remove most of its words, leaving behind a scatter of survivors that read as a new poem. The source stays visible as a ghost: blacked out, whited out, or simply printed with vast gaps where sentences used to be.
The form has a surprising moral range. It can be playful, as in blackout poems made from the morning paper, or deadly serious, as when poets erase government documents so that what remains testifies against what was removed. Either way, the poet's tools are a source text, a marker, and a ruthless eye.
A short history of taking words away
The landmark early work is Ronald Johnson's Radi os, published in 1977, which erased most of the first books of Milton's Paradise Lost so that a new cosmological poem floated in the white space. Tom Phillips spent decades painting over a Victorian novel to create A Humument, first published in 1970. Later practitioners widened the method: Mary Ruefle whites out old books with correction fluid, Austin Kleon popularised newspaper blackout poems, and Tracy K. Smith's poem Declaration erases the Declaration of Independence until it speaks about slavery. Srikanth Reddy's Voyager erases the memoir of Kurt Waldheim three separate times.
Rules and working conventions
Erasure has no line counts or rhyme schemes. Its rules are procedural, and poets choose how strict to be. The strongest convention is order: the surviving words keep the sequence they had in the source. Most practitioners also refuse to add words, letters or punctuation that were not there.
Presentation is a genuine decision, not decoration. Blackout keeps the redaction visible and feels political. White out or faded text makes the source ghostly. Reprinting only the survivors as clean verse hides the process entirely. Say where the text came from; naming the source is part of the meaning.
Making your first erasure
Photocopy your source so you can fail freely. Read the page once for sense, then again hunting only for strong words: concrete nouns, muscular verbs, one or two surprises. Circle candidates in pencil before committing ink. Build a spine of subject, verb and object across the page, then decide which extra words earn survival. Fewer is nearly always better; a page that keeps thirty words usually beats a page that keeps eighty. Step back and read only the survivors aloud. If the poem needs a word the page does not contain, find a different page.
What erasure does best, and its common failure
Erasure suits confrontation and haunting: poems about memory, censorship, official language and grief, where the missing text is part of the subject. It also suits play, and many poets use it purely as a generative warm up. The common failure is randomness, a scatter of pretty words with no syntax and no pressure between them, which reads like a word cloud. Insist that your survivors form phrases a voice could speak. The constraint is subtraction, but the standard is still poetry.
What poets can take from this
- Work on a photocopy and draft in pencil before any ink.
- Hunt verbs first; nouns are everywhere but verbs make sentences.
- Keep word order and add nothing, so the source stays honest.
- Let white space and gaps set the pace of reading.
- Choose sources whose subject rubs against your theme.
- For anything you plan to publish, use public domain or official government texts.
Try it yourself
Take a page of instructions from any manual or terms and conditions document and erase it until what remains is a love poem, keeping every surviving word in its original order.
Questions
What is the difference between erasure and blackout poetry?
Blackout poetry is one presentation style of erasure, where deleted words are covered with dark marker so the redaction stays visible. Erasure is the broader form, which also includes white out, faded text and clean retyped versions.
Is erasure poetry legal to publish?
Erasing a copyrighted text and publishing the result can infringe the original, so most poets publish erasures of public domain works, government documents or texts they have permission to use. Private practice on any text is fine.
Can I rearrange words in an erasure poem?
Convention says no. The surviving words keep their original order on the page, which is what separates erasure from collage. If you rearrange freely, you are writing a found poem instead.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
Enter a Writory poetry contest
Enter the September contest and have your own poem read and scored. That first entry makes you a Writorian.