Erasure Poems: This Vanishing is Illuminating [Samar Abulhassan]

Pausing our usual vocabularies in favor of a giddy, intuitive stumbling, we’ll make new poems by erasing, obscuring, and masking old text. Each student will generate a beautiful, seemingly impenetrable question or choose a koan (paradoxical statement) to explore through writing. Allowing this question to germinate while also forgetting about it, we will make new erasure poems meant to be tilted, vibrant responses to our inquiry. Expect to write five new poems. We’ll read the work of Tom Phillips, Matthea Harvey, Mary Ruefle, Ronald Johnson, and Jen Bervin.