Erasure
Making a poem by drowning the words around it
The poet, it is said, arrived at her method by accident, spilling ink across a borrowed and unremarkable page.
Where the fell, three words drowned, and the words that survived around them said something the author never meant.
, as a form, does not add a single word; it composes solely by taking away, sculpting a poem out of a prior prose.
Consider the source sentence, dull and administrative: The committee regrets that the proposal cannot be approved this year.
Redact the middle, and there remains: The committee regrets the proposal, cannot be approved, this year, a colder confession.
is the state's word for , the black bar drawn across what the citizen is not permitted to read.
The poet stole the state's instrument and turned it, deftly, toward the opposite of concealment, toward revelation.
What the censor buries, the poet exhumes, using the very same shovel, in the very same soil, to opposite intent.
is the wearing-away of a surface, the slow theft that time performs on a coin, a fresco, a gravestone's name.
The poet effaces on purpose and at speed, doing in an afternoon what a century of rain would do to an inscription.
Every word deleted is not lost but rendered , a ghost pressing faintly against the words allowed to stay.
For the reader who knows the source, the erased poem carries a , the taste of everything the poet chose to drown.
, ordinarily a flaw the careful writer prunes, becomes here the very engine of the method's power.
A word left standing beside a sudden gap may face two ways at once, meaning one thing to the eye and another to the wound.
The poet does not choose the new meaning so much as release it, the way a sculptor claims the statue was always in the stone.
Destruction and creation, the method proves, are not opposites but a single gesture seen from its two faces.
To make the new poem, one must be willing to injure the old, to prefer the wound one opens to the wholeness one destroys.
I tried the method myself, on a letter I had once received and never answered, and could not bring myself to burn.
I blacked out the accusations and kept the conjunctions, and what remained was a tenderness the letter had never offered.
The of the original, its old fury, pressed up through my like damp through fresh paint.
I had not falsified the letter, exactly; I had freed a truth it had been too angry, at the time, to say.
This is the vertigo of : the new text is neither a lie about the old nor faithful to it, but its buried .
A is what is left when the greater part is gone, the surviving scrap by which we are asked to imagine the whole.
Every act of reading, I began to see, is an , since to attend to one meaning is to black out a hundred others.
You are erasing this very sentence as you read it, keeping the words your need selects and drowning all the rest.
The poem you make of my paragraph will not be mine, and I have no way, and finally no wish, to call it back.
Take, then, this page, and a dark pen, and cross out everything that is not the sentence you have secretly been seeking.
What survives your hand will be a confession, and the only remaining question is whose confession you will find.