Erasure is a process by which you can take any text and from it, create a poem.
Below you will find a number of source texts. Choose one by clicking on the title. You will be sent to a new page where you can click on any word or punctuation mark to make it disappear. Clicking where it was will make it return. By removing much of the text a newly sculpted text (poem) appears.
When you are done creating your poem, you can save it to our archive, print it, or email it. To get a sense of the variety of poems that can be written from a given text, look through our archive. We will be putting up new source texts on a regular basis.
Latest Source Texts | Word Count |
| The Khaki Boys Over the Top Doing and Daring for Uncle Sam by Gordon Bates | 134 |
| The History of Insects by Unknown | 221 |
| A Bundle of Letters by Henry James | 255 |
| Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs | 289 |
| Buried Cities by Jennie Hall | 287 |
Latest Poems | Created |
| Every Child by Lisa Cole | 2012-02-03 |
| Incidents: Life of a Slave Girl by S Dickerson | 2012-02-03 |
| World of Confusion by Anonymous | 2012-02-02 |
| untitled by sumshi | 2012-02-02 |
| Advice by Anonymous | 2012-02-02 |
Project conceived by Joshua Beckman and David Hirmes. Design and Code by David Hirmes.
Special thanks to the good folks at NYFA.
Questions? Comments?