There’s a new breed of poets–the erasure poets, who have been composing by erasing portions of existing texts to provide commentary on the original and to create something wholly new. With the help of our longtime friends and co-presenters at Rain Taxi Review of Books, we’ve invited three erasure poets, Matthea Harvey, Janet Holmes, and Travis Macdonald, (whose first book, The O Mission Repo was an erasure of The 9/11 Commission Report!) to share their work on the Walker stage on Thursday, April 7th. You can try your own hand at erasure poetry at this site or just come and learn from the pros in April!
The erasure poets took their inspiration from the art world and artists, like Robert Rauschenberg, who set a precedent for this kind of rebellious creativity when he literally rubbed out a drawing by one of the fathers of modern art, Willem de Kooning (how’s that for Freudian drama?!). He talks about his piece “Erased de Kooning” in this great video from SFMoMA‘s archives:
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