“A slow and difficult process that verged on the ridiculous”: On Erasure

Srikanth Reddy’s Voyager begins quietly—its first section comprises short, strange, beautiful poems replete with tautologies that spin the mind far past the page. They muse on philosophy and war in a lyric feast of language: “To believe in the world, a person has to quiet thinking./The dead do not cease in the grave./The world is water falling on a stone.” It’s not until the section titled “Book 2” that you realize something curious is happening, when Reddy writes: “I began to cross out words from his book on world peace.” Whose book? Buried till the end, on the very last page, is a link to a website (tiny.cc/voyagermethod) that offers “A Note on Process,” where the secret is revealed: this entire miraculous collection is, in fact, an erasure of former UN Secretary General and alleged Nazi war criminal Kurt Waldheim’s autobiography, In the Eye of the Storm. When I first read Voyager, having swooned my way from cover to cover, I was astonished. How can this be possible? How on earth did the poet make this—what was the route from there to here?

The question—the gasp of how—that Voyager produced in me became a haunting, embedding itself in my brain. And then, an opportunity. Shortly after I first read Voyager, I encountered erasure again, in the way many encounter it: a writing prompt in an undergraduate poetry workshop. There was something sexy and transgressive about the idea of sneaking myself in between the lines of another’s artwork—like many an undergraduate, I had an irrepressible urge to misbehave. I’d also been taking a class on Freud. I decided to fuse my interests and play around with his Civilization and Its Discontents. My first go at it—eventually collected into a chapbook of brief poems titled, a little less than creatively, “Discontent and Its Civilizations”—wasn’t exactly the kind of erasure I would later practice. I used each individual page as a word bank, but allowed myself to reorder the words however I pleased, without repeating or adding any outside language.

The poems were of dubious quality, but I became obsessed with the challenge: erasure as puzzle and wordgame as much as poetic form. It seemed to me a kind of magic to take a made thing and make it almost unrecognizably new. Fervid, I began to experiment. I erased excerpts of great Russian novels, printed archives of friends’ Facebook profiles, Ezra Pound’s Cantos, and the academic articles of my own grandfather, an astrophysicist. And, in the self-unawareness of my youth, I was reckless. One project in particular was egregiously problematic: I began erasing Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, intending to write poems about my own burgeoning feelings of alienation and gender dysphoria—but in practice, I was appropriating a language of disability that I do not experience, vandalizing a text I had no right to reach my hands into.

As my own politics awoke and evolved, I recognized my own violence—the ableism and racism inherent in these endeavors, the way that white supremacy demands a devouring of language and culture as a key mechanism of control. I took a step back from the wanton hacking and slashing, and turned to books, my most beloved teachers. I studied. I scoured the library, read all the works of erasure I could find, and analyzed different approaches. I needed to learn more. I developed preferences, I gathered tools. Often, erasures announce themselves immediately—Jen Bervin’s Nets retains the text of the original Shakespeare; Mary Ruefle uncaps her trusty bottle of Wite-Out and carefully excises language from aged-brown paper in A Little White Shadow; Tom Phillips’s long-term erasure project A Humument fuses visual art and poetic erasure, superimposing version after version onto copies of an obscure Victorian novel. I learned that there are many ways to make an erasure poem. The practice, while incredibly diverse in its manifestations, requires that the poet erase, delete, or otherwise obfuscate the majority of a source text—the resulting poem is what remains of the original document. There are no defined or monolithic rules to erasure—it is not a strictly established form, with specific metrical requirements or rhyme schemes. Instead, the poet determines their own procedure. These limitations serve at once to constrain the poet’s diction while simultaneously enabling intense creative possibility. Erasure, like any form, arrests the poet’s access to unlimited language, birthing new opportunities for invention and innovation.

As I studied, I realized that what I loved most about Voyager was that Reddy’s erasures don’t just look like “regular” poems, they read like them, too; they sound and flow like poems. (Taking inspiration from William Carlos Williams’s experiment in bridging the gap between free and metered verse, the third section of the book employs his stepped, triadic line and variable foot—resulting in a rhythmic complexity that is appallingly beautiful, especially considering the stringency of Reddy’s constraint.) They build in momentum and follow a structural, intelligible arc from the volume’s beginning to end; they avoid the choppy fragmentation that typifies much contemporary erasure poetry.

Erasure merges two voices inside a single small bit of language and forces a confrontation. Robin Coste Lewis says in her lecture “The Race Within Erasure”: “When it is really, really, really good, erasure can reveal more about the projects of both writers simultaneously.” I think of works like Nicole Sealey’s The Ferguson Report, which, over the course of an erasure that spans eighty-four pages of the original text, pulls a poem achingly slow from an obscenely callous document, a poem agonizing both in content and in the effort the reader must devote to read it word by word. Erasure can be a remarkably effective way of reckoning with power. It is never apolitical—the word “erasure” itself carries sinister connotations. People, events, tragedies, and identities are erased from history. Truth and reality are erased and rewritten by white supremacist systems, both implicit and explicit, to control and enforce a brutally particular narrative. Solmaz Sharif writes in her crucial, mandatory essay on erasure, “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical”: “The first time I confronted erasure as an aesthetic tactic I was horrified.” When we erase a text that was created by another we are enacting a violence upon it. This can be acceptable: perhaps the text is so abhorrent that it deserves such treatment! But this should never be a comfortable process. When well done, an erasure poem can turn the knife around. It can be a violence against violence. It can move across time. When we cut away the present of a document, we are allowing something new to be born out of absence: a process full of both possibility and risk.

Whether one is erasing a text to honor or critique it, the simple fact remains that one is very literally tearing someone else’s language asunder. M. NourbeSe Philip’s ZONG!: As told to the author by Setaey Adamu Boateng painfully, painstakingly, and systematically erases over and over the text of a legal decision regarding a case in which over 150 enslaved human beings were drowned in order for the slavers to collect on an insurance policy taken out on their lives. On the process of making the erasures, Philip writes:

I murder the text, literally cut it into pieces, castrating verbs, suffocating adjectives, murdering nouns, throwing articles, prepositions, conjunctions overboard, jettisoning adverbs: I separate subject from verb, verb from object—create semantic mayhem, until my hands bloodied, from so much killing and cutting, reach into the stinking, eviscerated innards, and like some seer, sangoma, or prophet who, having sacrificed an animal for signs and portents of a new life, or simply life, reads the untold story that tells itself by not telling.

It is inarguable that the source text of ZONG!, Gregson v. Gilbert, is a document that deserves murdering; but Philip recognizes that violence is still violence. And out of Philip’s excruciating process of violent excavation comes a chorus of ancestors whose voices overwhelm the cold evil of a text that reduces a massacre to a question of commerce. Philip undertakes a tactile procedure of exhumation and transformation; the result is one of the finest and most complex works of literature I have ever encountered.

Erasure insists on the physicality of poetry. It is palpably deliberate, intentional, and (ideally) extremely careful. It must not be taken lightly. It is a terrible thing to do to a text, even if that text is itself terrible. It is a form that must be respected and distrusted, simultaneously. Which is not to say that erasure must always be an antagonistic enterprise. Gentle Reader!, by Matthew Rohrer, Joshua Beckman, and Anthony McCann, was born from a mutual desire of three friends to collaboratively study the works of the Romantics. By creating poems out of the very works that they are discussing and moving through, they use the form as a sort of portal: a way of understanding and engaging with a body of literature by diving intimately inside the language itself. Gentle Reader! is an homage, a tribute: here erasure is an exercise in friendship, learning, and play.

After immersing myself in study, the quality of my hunger changed. I still wanted to erase—one thing I love about erasure is just how very playful it can feel to move through a text, selecting and arranging words together as if assembling a puzzle—but I knew I needed to slow down and take a kind of care I hadn’t taken in my earlier efforts. I stopped my extractive search for the perfect victim to subject to my obliterating pen. I worked on other projects. I began graduate school. I read and wrote poems. I went about my life.

And then, it found me. It came to me accidentally, as the best things do: a battered copy of a classic horror novel, sparkling toward my eye from a stack of used books outside the Strand in New York City. I was curious, compelled, I can’t say why. I took it home. It was a time of both uncertainty and excitement—new to New York, and new to the gender identity I had finally found a name for. Flipping through its yellow pages, I found a comfortable home for my bottled anger and resentment.

I had first read Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a bored teenager, while working behind the front desk at my summer job at the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth Port, Massachusetts, surrounded by the lavish set pieces Gorey designed for a Broadway adaptation of the novel in 1977. I was not particularly captivated by its laborious pacing and superfluous detail—much more interesting to me were the bloodsuckers done and dusted by Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Rereading it much later, my reaction was visceral.

I was immediately struck by the intensity of Stoker’s misogyny, his fear of the unfamiliar and of sexuality. The book seemed to cast womanhood as the monster more than anything. In some ways, I felt a fierce desire to defend the femininity I was just discovering in myself in the earliest phases of transition. And the book reminded me of particular violences, inflicted upon me and so many other women in my life—desecrations of the body, denials of agency and humanity. It produced in me a creative rage; I wanted to tear it apart, subject it to its own assaults. I started writing poems. But I didn’t start with erasure—I didn’t even think to at first. I wrote around Dracula—a long series of short epistolary poems between the women of the novel, Lucy Westenra and Mina Murray, but I wasn’t satisfied; the poems didn’t work. Having exhausted every avenue, but still feeling a compulsion to engage with this infuriating book, I decided to try writing about the novel from the inside out.

The first erasures were failures. A professor, Kimiko Hahn, was generous in her blunt assessment—the poems were decently executed, but the idea was boring. Writing from the perspective of the vampire himself, I was trodding over ground already beaten into mud. I wasn’t saying anything new or interesting enough that would justify the kind of violence I was subjecting Stoker’s novel to. I scrapped the poems, started over, and somehow found the voice of a narrator, a voice that whispered out from the terrain of ink and paper and made herself known to me. I followed her as faithfully as I could.

At the outset of the project that eventually became R E D, I devised a series of rigid precepts not dissimilar to Reddy’s process to guide and focus me. Going chapter by chapter through the novel, I first reread the text entirely. Then, I went through and circled potentially useful or interesting bits of language that could aid me in the process of excavation, brickword by brickword, from Stoker’s book. From there, I built my poem. Text was erased while preserving the word order of the original source and with no words altered or added. With few exceptions, I did not allow myself to lift more than five words in a row. Once the resulting poem was divorced from its source, I relineated in the shape of a conventional poem, with sparse punctuation added to aid rhythm and intelligibility. Remembering the awe I felt when first reading Voyager, I took pains to produce erasures that looked and sounded like poems, distinct from Stoker’s voice and more in line with my own. I walked with the narrator of my book and tried to help her story into the world—to crawl out of a grave, into the sunlight.

The process of making this book was arduous and often distressing. I carried the chapters of Dracula with me (literally stuffed into a back pocket everywhere I went), and they haunted me in sleep and in waking every day for more than two years. It suffused my experience of life in a way I cannot say was pleasant. A book is a difficult thing to make already; this book devastated me. I loved writing it in a way that’s hard to explicate, but it hurt—I think it was supposed to. If I’d known how much, I’m not sure I would have started. Without the aid of friends, advisors, and editors (among many the poet Matthew Rohrer and my inimitable, glorious-hearted, and patient editor Sampson Starkweather), I’m sure I would not have finished.

I must confess: though perhaps it runs against the spirit of this series, I think erasure is in fact a hard form to master. It takes a serious amount of practice, failure, time, and energy. It is, in my opinion, an exceedingly laborious way to make a poem. “Now, to cross line after line out of his work seemed to me a slow and difficult process that verged on the ridiculous,” Reddy writes in “Book 2” of Voyager. “I labored, often tempted to throw up my hands in frustration, on this form.” Almost always, it is more prudent to write about a text than it is to write out of it. Erasure is dangerous, an appropriative form that risks reinscribing colonial harms through thoughtless practice. Erasure horrifies me even as I engage in it. If I am comfortable, I’m doing something wrong.