Destruction is also creation. And this Make it with MoFA is all about a form of destruction that is both visual art and lyric: erasure poetry.
Erasure poetry is simple.
That’s it! Scroll down for examples.
Travis Macdonald argues that time and the elements were the first erasure poets, since they have effaced sacred scriptures, stone engravings, the works of Sappho, and many, many other texts.
Nonetheless, there can be beauty and expression in the act of erasure. As an erasing of the word “erasing” reveals:
Erasing/ sing/ i
Here is one of Austin Kleon’s newspaper blackout poems. (He used a Sharpie.)
Here are the first two pages from my erasure of John Milton’s “Lycidas.” I turned this canonical, bromantic elegy into a story about two sorority girls. And I used color pencils.
Page from Tom Phillips’ erasure poem “A Humument”