Un/published: Presence and Absence in Contemporary Erasure Poetry

Erasure is a popular form of appropriative poetry that refashions found material by partially effacing it. Made of salvaged fragments and deletion marks, erasure poetry puts processes of obliteration on display and provides a structural analogy for both the social erasure of marginalized groups and the critical rewriting of hegemonic discourses. This essay understands erasure as a constraint-based appropriative practice and differentiates it from other forms of conceptual and documentary poetry. It argues that erasures use the oscillation between presence (of the retained words, the redaction marks and elisions, and the newly created poem) and absence (of some of the words and material and medial features of the prior text) to destabilize the boundaries between the published and unpublished, between what is heard and what is silenced, between the sayable and what exceeds representation. Reading poems by Tracy Smith, Janet Holmes, and Jen Bervin that erase the Declaration of Independence and the poetry of Emily Dickinson respectively, the essay shows how erasures intervene in public conversations about social justice by repurposing and revising their intertexts, allowing new speakers, knowledges, and narratives to emerge. Erasures prompt a layered reading that directs the readers back to the source and its sociocultural contexts while drawing them deeper into the imaginative and discursive world of the erasure poem.“Erasure poetry allows us to read in recognition of what is absent or missing and to imagine new voices and perspectives emerging from the cleared and transformed spaces of the page.”