In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 280.
The popular (and accessible) form of the erasure poem depends on the act of erasure itself being interesting—i.e. what it is that is being erased (a public document, a canonical text) and/or what the technique of erasure might be. Using the syntactic armature of a pre-existing poem may be interesting, veer into the territory of mere imitation, or even approach plagiarism. My interest is in poems and poetry that press against the norms of poetic form and structure.
Gertrude Stein gave us Tender Buttons in 1914 and Mina Loy gave us “Brancusi’s Golden Bird” in 1922. As long as books are filled with poems that don’t seem to know that Modernism happened, what does one have to fear from Large Language Models? It’s entirely possible that new work is more interesting than another poem in imitation of the last fifty or sixty years.
I supposed I’ve tipped my hand by invoking Stein and Loy. Every writer I know labors under a broad cultural canon (in English, it might be fair to say Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, and Shelley (Mary)), and with their own private canon. But all canons are influences. The large and public one is never fixed. It quivers with effort: both the effort to “fix” it in place and the effort to include new voices. The private canon of each writer contains the real works which inspire and speak to them. Sometimes there are foundational voices buried deep within, the voices that perhaps brought a writer to poetry but ones the writer doesn’t read anymore. Or perhaps there is even a public voice that had an unknown effect on a writer. For example, the meters of Chaucer’s Middle English loom behind the rhythms of contemporary Anglophone verse, whether or not one has read him in that vernacular. Milton’s stunning conflict between iconoclasm and devout belief haunts the spiritual and secular landscape of Anglophone writing equally deeply.
What happens when we “erase” some of these foundational texts? Ronald Johnson did it with Milton—from Paradise Lost he drew forth Radi Os (Sand Dollar Press, 1977). Alice Oswald did something both more and less invasive with Memorial (Faber & Faber, 2011), her “translation” of the Iliad, rendering only the death scenes and similes of death, about one seventh of the entire epic.
As a writing exercise, choose any translation of Sappho—I use Anne Carson’s for this prompt because it foregrounds the spatial aspects of the shredded papyri. Write back into, around, through, or in the margins of the fragments. One can respond to the words, write against them, extend them, or ignore them. Preferably you are writing in ink, into the actual book itself. Errors become wanderings. Cross-outs remain as proof, condemnation, or amnesty.
You may keep Sappho’s words in your poem—with acknowledgement, certainly!—or remove them in your poem’s final stages, in gratitude for their role as muse and guide.
As another experiment: Page through Jen Bervin’s Nets (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004), a wonderful erasure of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and choose any page, or even two. Write back into the poem, keeping Bervin’s words from the sonnet where they are spatially. “Sonne,” “sun” in Middle English is what we would call the eventual anthology of these attempts. The “ne” connects this title to Bervin’s “Nets,” so they can be understood to be a two-part project, Bervin’s private book Nets, and this publicly, communally authored, conceptually pending book, Sonne.
Kazim Ali is a professor of comparative literature and literary arts at the University of California in San Diego, and the founding editor of Nightboat Books. His newest volume of poetry is The Man in 119 (Copper Canyon Press, 2026).
image credit: Europeana