It’s Friday! You’ve been writing poetry all week. I’ll go easy on you. You don’t even have to write any words today. Just find some you like and cross the rest out.
Erasure. Unleash the Sharpies, poets! We’re going to make poems by obliterating words today. Trust me, this is fun. Erasure poems seem to be all the rage these days. Find yourself a source text and redact (fancy legal word for white out/black out/obscure) the words you don’t want, leaving only the ones you do want. You can do this with legal forms, junk mail, newspaper articles, obituaries, wedding vows, song lyrics, pages of old books. Try it with a famous or important document. Try it with a trivial and ridiculous document. Maybe try it with a document that has a vocabulary and tone that is very different from yours. Is there a hidden meaning you would like to highlight? Would it be cathartic to manipulate the words of the writer or speaker and turn them to your own purpose?
Now, let’s talk logistics. You can print your source text and go after it with a black marker. Then it is pretty clear what you have done and the act of doing it, even the form of the marks you make, become a visual part of your poem. As a Google Image search for “erasure poem,” demonstrates, this can be quite beautiful. You can also use one of those little correction tape dispensers or doodle or paint over your source text. For the digitally inclined, you can cut and paste your text into a word processing program and change the font color of the text you want to omit to white. It remains there, as a placeholder keeping the words you want to use in place, but your poem shines through very cleanly.
Here is an erasure poem I made using the last 25 tweets (at time of writing) from that prolific tweeter, @realDonaldTrump: