Erasure Poetry
Quick answer: Erasure poetry creates a poem by deleting most of an existing text, letting the remaining words speak. Learn key examples, ethics and how to make one.
Erasure poetry is a form in which the poet takes an existing text and removes most of it, so that the words left behind, usually kept in their original positions on the page, form a new poem. The source stays visible as absence: white gaps, faded type or crossed-out passages show where language used to be. The poem is what survived.
Poets use erasure for reasons ranging from play to protest. Carving a lyric out of a boring document is a game of attention, but erasing a political speech, a colonial history or a legal judgment is an argument: it exposes what a text was hiding, or performs on the page what power did to people. The form also speaks to anyone who has redacted, censored or grieved, which is why it has become one of the defining practices of recent poetry.
How It Works
Take a page of source text and delete until a poem remains, keeping the surviving words in their original order and, in the strict version, their original positions. Suppose an invented paragraph from a tenancy agreement reads the tenant shall surrender the premises in the condition received, allowing for reasonable wear. Erase it down to surrender the condition, allowing wear, and a bureaucratic clause becomes a small verdict on a relationship. Presentation choices matter: some erasures print only the survivors amid white space, others show the deletions as grey ghosts, and blackout, the marker-pen variant, makes the removal itself the visual subject.
Where You Will See It
Ronald Johnson's Radi os, from 1977, carved a luminous long poem out of the opening books of Paradise Lost, and its title enacts the method, letters deleted from Paradise Lost's own words. Jen Bervin's Nets thins Shakespeare's sonnets to scattered phrases, Mary Ruefle whites out Victorian pages in A Little White Shadow, and Srikanth Reddy's Voyager erases the memoir of Kurt Waldheim three separate times. Tracy K. Smith's widely taught poem Declaration erases the Declaration of Independence until an account of slavery emerges from the founders' own sentences. M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong! builds an entire book from the words of one eighteenth-century legal decision about a massacre aboard a slave ship.
How to Use It in Your Own Poems
Choose a source with some relationship to your subject; the meaning of an erasure is always partly the meaning of what you chose to erase. Photocopy or duplicate the page so you can attempt several versions, then work in passes: first strike the obviously dead weight, then live with the remainder before cutting deeper. Respect the form's one hard rule, no adding words and no reordering. Credit the source plainly. And think ethically: erasing a survivor's testimony reads very differently from erasing a dictator's speech, and the difference is the poem's real content.
What poets can take from this
- Pick sources whose authorship or authority is part of what you want to say.
- Work on copies so you can fail freely and compare versions.
- Read the survivors aloud without the page; the poem must work by ear as well as eye.
- Resist erasing toward a sentence you already had in mind; let the page surprise you.
- Decide deliberately how visible the deletions should be, since that visibility is a tonal choice.
Try it yourself
Find a page of instructions from a job you no longer do, an old handbook, rota or training document, and erase it until it becomes a poem about why you left. Keep every surviving word exactly where it stood.
Questions
What is the difference between erasure poetry and blackout poetry?
Blackout poetry is a species of erasure in which the removed text is covered with ink, usually black marker, so the redaction is visible and often decorative. Erasure is the broader practice, which may present deletions as white space, faint type or cut paper.
Do I need permission to erase a copyrighted text?
For private practice, no. For publication it is safer to erase public domain or governmental texts, or to seek permission, since an erasure reproduces fragments of the source verbatim. Many published erasures deliberately use out-of-copyright or official documents.
Is erasure poetry disrespectful to the original author?
It can honour, argue with or expose the source, and poets choose targets accordingly. Erasing Milton into light verse is homage; erasing state documents can be protest. The relationship you strike with the original is part of the poem's meaning.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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