Erasure Poetry

Take a text and remove most of it to create something new. Also known as blackout poems.

I’ve been making erasure poetry for five years now on my Instagram. Austin Kleon inspired me at first with his newspaper poems.

I start with looking for interesting words, circling them, then building up sentences from there. I tend not to have a plan, but see what is within the text. It’s very subconscious, very Diffused Mode. If two people were given the same text they would produce two very different erasure poems.

I use a lot of music review magazines as they have interesting word choices.