Erasure Poetry

The effacement of found text as a means for self-reflection, critique of culture, and ultimately original creation is an exercise we tried during the preparation of the exhibition. The method for creating your own erased (or blacked out) poem is simple:

i) Take a text of your choice. Pick something that tickles your imagination even though you cannot explain why. Stop trying to explain it! Just pick a scientific report, a newspaper, a carton of milk. Maybe, pick this text.

ii) Read the text while actively discouraging your analytical mind from extracting information. Remember, we are not trying to understand; we do already. We are looking to self-reflect and come to as direct a dialogue with the text as possible.

iii) Take a black marker and, as you are reading your text again, start erasing those words that disrupt the inherent musicality of the text.

iv) As you move from word to word, and as you are focusing on the word-melody in your head, start finding inherent connections of ‘meaning’ between the words you chose. Keep only those. As many or as few as you want.

v) Voilà! You have just created an erased poem by effacing a found text. It comprises of words with inherent musicality and some kind of implicit or explicit ‘meaning’, in free verse: a poem.

Now see yourself in it and despair.

In this room we have curated for you a small sample of our own erased poems. Our choice of found text is the 1925 League of Nations conference that formalized and implemented the use of passports in its current form. Our own reflections and self-reflections varied: some of us saw only ourselves, others found humour, and some even managed a peek into the poetics of detrimentally dry documents. Enjoy!