Erasure is a form of found poetry or found art created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem. The results can be allowed to stand in situ or they can be arranged into lines and/or stanzas. Erasure is a way to give an existing piece of writing a new set of meanings, questions, or suggestions. It lessens the trace of authorship but requires purposeful decision making. What does one want done to the original text? Does a gesture celebrate, denigrate, subvert, or efface the source completely? One can erase intuitively by focusing on musical and thematic elements or systematically by following a specific process regardless of the outcome.
Contents
Here is a nonce example using text from the November 2003 version of the English Wikipedia Main Page:
complete and free we started and are visit experiment you can right nowSeveral contemporary writers/artists have adopted this form to achieve a range of cognitive or symbolic effects.
Examples
Doris Cross appears to have been among the earliest to utilize this technique, beginning in 1965 with her "Dictionary Columns" book art. d.a. levy also worked in this mode at about the same time.
Use in representations of the Holocaust
Jonathan Safran Foer did a book-length erasure of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz which he entitled Tree of Codes. Schulz was killed by an officer of the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation of his hometown Drohobycz, after distributing the bulk of his life's work to gentile friends immediately prior to the occupation. All of these manuscripts have been lost. Safran-Foer writes:"All that we have of his fiction are two slim collections, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under The Sign of the Hourglass. On the basis of these, Schulz is considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Their long shadow--the work lost to history--is, in many ways, the story of the century." The Tree of Codes is Safran-Foer's attempt to represent the unrepresentable loss which occurred in the Holocaust by deleting text, rather than by writing another book about the Holocaust as a historical subject or context for a work of fiction. Safran-Foer's approach to the Holocaust as an "unrepresentable subject" recalls the use of negative space in the poetry of Dan Pagis.
Representing government secrecy
Jenny Holzer's Redaction Paintings may be considered a work of erasure.
The work consists of enlarged, colorized silkscreen "paintings" of declassified and often heavily censored American military and intelligence documents that have recently been made available to the public through the Freedom of Information Act. Beautiful in their own right, the works are also haunting reminders of what really goes on behind the scenes in the American military/political power system. Documents address counter-terrorism, prisoner abuse, and even the threat of Osama Bin Laden. Some of the documents are almost completely inked out, like Colin Powell's memo on Defense Intelligence Agency reorganization.
Anthropologist Michael Powell writes: "While the literal act of redaction attempts to extract information and eradicate meaning, the black marker actually transforms the way we read these documents, sparking curiosity and often stirring skeptical, critical, and even cynical readings. As redacted government documents make their way from government bureaus into the hands of citizens, a peculiar transformation seems to take place, one that seems to create a paranoia within reason."