Otherwise Hidden, or Self-Erasure: A Teleology

To Whom it May Concern:

I am writing to ask you to consider revising
          visiting room standards
so that a visitor may rest his or her head on the shoulder
          of the person they are visiting.
I understand that the visiting room policy directive
          prohibiting physical contact
between prisoner and visitor except for hand-holding
          and one kiss and one embrace
at the beginning and end of each visit serves to prevent sexual
          misconduct
in the visiting room (I understand
          this is a priority).
I fail to see how resting a head on a shoulder represents
          sexual misconduct
or poses a security threat, or threatens the law-and-order
          of the facility. Yesterday
we saw a brother reprimanded more for patting his sister’s back
          as she cried than for dropping his vending machine chips
on the tiled floor in fruitless protest.

Sincerely, 

Many poems and poem-drafts about prison, my proximity (or non-) to it, my experience navigating the mass incarceration system as a loved one—are not included in the final manuscript of my debut collection FREELAND (Alice James Books, 2025). This is a normal—necessary—part of writing and assembling a manuscript. “Kill your darlings,” or whatever. We produce far more than we can include. This is not, inherently, a tragedy. Over time, our work improves, or shifts, such that earlier pieces no longer fit. The narrative path turns away from its original direction, and a poem that perhaps worked within the original trajectory is no longer relevant.

One such poem is the above epistle—a letter to an unnamed agent of the criminal legal system ostensibly able to change policies applied to prison visitors. The letter, written to and by anonymous figures, features seemingly polite requests for seemingly reasonable procedural revisions (more time allotted for the welcome hug, for example) and poorly masked critiques of a system that works on all fronts to oppress and deny for the sake not of safety, but of, teleologically, oppression and denial. 

When I wrote it, the logic behind this poem felt elegant; the letter form appropriate in light of the letters my then-beloved and I exchanged, letters being both the most intimate form of communication available to us and, simultaneously, the only form by which non-system-affiliated people can contact “higher-ups.” The intellectual underpinnings, I can still hear my MFA thesis advisor explain, exceeded the literary execution (a gap I will always be chasing). The poem was also just boring, relevant to the book’s sensibilities but saying nothing new or of interest. “Few people will disagree with the poem,” my advisor advised. “There’s nothing radical happening here.” 

Years after its original drafting, tasked with providing any additional poems or versions of poems to the publisher’s editor that might fit in the already-accepted-but-yet-unfinished-manuscript, I refound this fictive letter and added it to this “possibility folder.” We didn’t end up selecting the poem for the book—still too obvious and boring, we decided—but the years since the original composition had provided some padding necessary for me to look at it more rigorously. As is, the poem didn’t stand. But I’d since delved into what I now consider a lifelong obsession with erasure, and, fresh off of rereading Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip and Voyager by Srikanth Reddy in preparation to facilitate a Forms & Features Workshop on self-erasure, it dawned on me that one livening approach to this piece, which I couldn’t seem to leave behind despite its drabness, was the very topic I was preparing to present.

In her essay documenting her process writing the canonical erasure text Zong!, M. NourbeSe Philip writes: “There are two poems—the one I want to write and the one writing itself.”¹ This insight is not restricted to discussions of erasure; indeed, one might fashion an entire psycho-poetic theory around the way a poem often reveals to the writer that which was previously unknown; the inherent discovery in the poetic act. There are almost always two poems—perhaps four to five—in any given poem a poet may be drafting. The poet’s job, then, becomes teasing those poems apart; deciding, in a logic known only to themselves, which lines belong where; where one poem stops and another begins. But this is an essay about erasure. Self-erasure, not editing. Right?

I’ve encountered erasure. I’ve “done” erasure. I’ve read about it and written about it and thought about it. But never had I “done it” to my own writing. “Self-erasure,” as it is sometimes called, could also just be called “editing.”A conversation with Poetry Foundation’s Library Adult Programs Manager (and Forms & Features creator/coordinator) Maggie Queeney landed at this hilariously obvious possibility: we write, then we cut, and cut, and arrange, and cut, and, voila! Poem. Is this not self-erasure? 

In the spirit of engaging the beginnings of a formal epistemology, I here distinguish “self-erasure” from “editing” on the basis of process and intention. The intention behind “editing” is to “better the poem.” The intention behind “self-erasure” depends upon the writer—or enactor—but demands an awareness and eagerness to change, by way of redaction/omission, and/or to somehow include or allude to that redaction/omission in the “final” poem. Self-erasure, the form, at the very least references the process, and, when well-executed, both process and form are in conversation with content.

Self-erasure, as a defined form, is not extensively described (yet). Like many “experimental” approaches to poetry, it is likely that writers have been engaging in the process for eons before attempts to name and categorize it (likely an erasure of early self-erasure artists because of their identities, changing principles around claiming propriety over poetic forms, and/or other reasons). Additional causes of the dearth of literature on self-erasure may rest upon its novelty as a contemporary form, and/or may have more to do with a paucity of records of earlier artists who experimented with self-erasure but didn’t codify it in an institutionally recognizable fashion (and/or, the “institution” of the time expressed no interest in the idea—erasure strikes again). 

Existing literature is sparse and mostly discussed by two artists—Kristina Marie Darling and Sam Taylor, whose interviews² on the subject, and projects engaging the practice, are among the first and most likely to appear when conducting a rudimentary search on “self-erasure” online. “Who first thought of this thing?” laughs Taylor, in a conversation with Darling published in the Colorado Review in 2015³. Certainly, part of the joke is an acknowledgment that claiming “ownership” of a poetic (or artistic) process is a slippery endeavor, one often full of historical omission (erasure!), deliberate or otherwise. 

Thus, the field of self-erasure—if it can yet be called a field—is ripe for interrogation, or at least, enough without precedent that I took liberties in my own inquiry, and ended up finding great resonance with the subject not only in existing texts on self-erasure, but also in other sources containing discussions of self, what of the self the poet chooses (consciously and unconsciously) to reveal in the poem, what arises subconsciously in the poem, how one might surprise oneself with the poem, and so forth. In other words, I sought—seek—not to summarize and analyze what’s been said, but to hypothesize why one would engage self-erasure as a process and form; what it can do to/with/for our work.

Self-erasure confronts the artist with a seemingly impassable dilemma: if an artist’s intention is, with their art, to speak (create), why ever would they erase—synonymously silence, cancel—their own utterance? The very idea seems incompatible with creation itself. If the poem is a result of the poet’s self-asserting their presence, why would the poet ever wish to erase their own assertion? The implication here is dark and not without humor: when I queried friends about “self-erasure,” many joked that they had “no idea, literarily,” but to let them know if I figured out a way, “literally,” the obvious reference being death by suicide. Removing oneself from being.⁴ These friends, some poets, some not, were mostly but not entirely kidding, many having already engaged the idea in modes ranging from thought experiment to near success. It strikes me now, however, that the label, when applied to poetry, assumes that the poem itself is the self itself; that to erase the poem is to literally erase the self. That the self is the poem; not metaphor, but some kind of meta-metonymy. 

Do I actually believe this? 

Perhaps some do, but I can’t help sigh at discourse obsessed with parsing diction like “the speaker” or “the writer of the poem.” Self-erasure can, in process and product, address the multitude of selves we each contain (a la Whitman), and/or the multitude of “yous”—both the plural “you,” and the multitudes within the “you”—of an audience/reader(s) (such as the inescapable “you” in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen). 

Though not speaking in terms of “self-erasure,” Airea D. Matthews, in an interview⁵ with Rachel Zucker on the poetry podcast Commonplace, mused on this idea of a multitudinous self or “you”: 

“When I’m looking into characters, I’m wondering, what does that character say about me? And what does it tell me about me? How does it explain myself in a way that I don’t yet understand myself? What makes us connected?... I think that kind of struggle, and I do consider it a struggle, that writing struggle for me, makes it difficult for me to just have kind of the monolithic “I,” just the one I that’s concentrated on the current or present narrative or the past narrative. I’m constantly thinking of self as a concept that is agile and flexible. [It] is relatable through the other, which is where the simulacra comes in, where it’s like, you've got this object that represents object or subject. That represents another object or subject. So it’s, for me, it’s all about representation.” 

Here, Matthews identifies and casts doubt upon what she calls the “monolithic ‘I,’” suggesting a more unstable, less singular, sense of ego. From this lens, it is easier to imagine extrapolating a poem—or an “I”—hiding within an original poem; an active but sub- or un-conscious poem at work under or inside of the one that first, or most readily, shows its face.

torrin a. greathouse’s signature “burning haibun” is an emergent form that directly confronts the above queries. The burning haibun, which could be described as a form of self-erasure, is becoming more known, though still lagging behind other nouveau types like Jericho Brown’s Duplex or Terrance Hayes’ Golden Shovel. A burning haibun is a poem that begins with a prose piece and ends with a haiku (like Bashō’s “traditional” haibun). What differs here, however, is a middle section: an erasure of the first piece that bridges us to the haiku, which is itself an erasure of this intermediary. Here, the poet’s journey is laid bare: the reader is literally shown the moves the poet makes to get from A (prose poem) to C (haiku), and the haiku is often understood as an essentialization—or revelation—of the original. Part B shows us the exoskeleton; what must be shed in the process of revelation to reach the haiku. See greathouse’s “Dancing in the Dark” or Winniebell Xinyu Zong’s “sundress: a burning haibun,” both first published in POETRY, for brilliant examples, and Greathouse’s own explanation of the form and instructions for/on its use, here and here.

Another obvious reason for self-erasure is that traditional erasure often elicits necessary yet beguiling questions surrounding ethics, power, and oppression: who is allowed to “erase” who, and why? Self-erasure offers what some of us might see as an “out.” Apart from the scenario in which someone writes a persona poem in the voice of a person belonging to a group more oppressed than that of the writer (for more on that, see Sharif’s interview in Lightbox Poetry⁶, where she asserts “I have an imperfect litmus test for myself. If I am using the words of someone outside of myself (I hardly believe in this division), if I am using source material from an atrocity in a poem, would I be willing to read the poem in front of someone directly affected by that atrocity? In other words, if a Guantanamo inmate were at my reading, would I read “Reaching Guantanamo”? If not, is it because it now rings fraudulent? cruel? pointless? Then I don’t think I have a right to write the poem. Or is it just because I’m scared and don’t want to put my neck out—well, too bad.”). Writing one’s own poem, and then manipulating and erasing it, is a deft way to avoid the whole conversation surrounding appropriation or taking a voice already too often silenced. This is not offered as a “better than” or “worse than” alternative, but simply an alternative. 

Self-erasure, as a description and form, can be applied in many circumstances, including the artist’s own reclamation of self. What do we call documents that are not by, but instead are about, us? Documents such as medical notes or legal correspondence—documents that can and do dictate our lives and livelihood, and yet our authorial self is completely absent in both their making and often the maker’s mind. Who owns these documents? In legalese, medical documents belong to the patient, so in a way, engaging in erasure of one’s own medical notes from, say, an involuntary psych hold, could be described as erasure or self-erasure, depending on orientation and intent. Further complicating the question in the preceding example: what if the episode that had landed the writer on the psych hold in the first place was one that involved an attempt to take their own life, or involved one’s loss of sense of self at all? Self-erasure becomes teleological, again, and the wormhole deepens.

Let us return to Philips’s “erasure reveals the poem that is being written, vs. the one I want to write.” The burning haibun notwithstanding, this one feels most appropriate, or graspable, as an entry point, as a starting place, as a talking point to introduce others to the conversation; invite others to the exercise, despite—or because of—its ongoing-ness. How does one reveal the poem being written? How does one allow that “unwritten” poem to surface?

These ideas and questions fueled the Forms & Features Workshop I facilitated in partnership with the Poetry Foundation in October 2024. Titled “Disappearing Forms and Self-Erasure: Where What Why?” we reviewed the foundations of “regular” erasure poetry, acknowledging the vast landscape of approaches, forms, processes, and uses of the form. I also provided a visual I devised for poets embarking on erasure, as a foundation from which we departed to add the “self” aspect of “self-erasure.” 

For participants, I defined the term “self-erasure” as “engaging in the poetic erasure process using your own writing, including (but not limited to) an existing poem you wrote; a letter (including texts/emails) you wrote; your own journals, to-do lists, recipes, notes; and even writing that belongs to you be you did not write, such as your own medical records, which legally belong to the patient but were not written by you.” We reviewed some of the sparse but existing writing on the subject, drawing particular attention to Kristina Marie Darling’s observations that in mourning, “Words lose their meaning, and so too, grammar becomes insufficient for construction relationships between phenomena. For me, erasure came to represent this kind of despair, a rejection of language and one’s own voice as being insufficient,” and further, that “Self-erasure … becomes dialogue, a conversation between parts of the self or parts of the consciousness.”⁷ We also considered torrin a. greathouses’s description of the burning haibun (which I am here generalizing to include other forms of self-erasure) as “Generative failure within the text.”

Let’s pause here for a moment and appreciate that Greathouse’s “failure” is not an accusation or indictment, but rather an invitation: what is/was lost in the original version (generation) of the/your text? What did we “fail” to see in the first generative process? Can that failure be revealed? To ourselves? To a reader? How, and why? A response, if not answer, to some of these provocations can be found in a revised version of the original visual I created for erasure poetry.

We looked at several examples of self-erasure, including excerpts from The Book of Fools by Sam Taylor and “Reaching Guantánamo” by Solmaz Sharif. For each example, we considered: What is the source poem? Who is speaking in the poem, and what is the speaker’s relationship to the writer? What is erased? What is the result? What is the purpose of the erasure? 

After a break (any workshop over one hour should include a break!), workshop participants returned with one of each of the following documents: 

• one draft of a “stale” poem / an unedited poem you’ve set aside/given up on
• one document about you (doctor notes, article, legal statement, etc.)
• one “finished” poem 

Participants were offered two exercises: 

1. The “Stale Draft” Exercise

   a. Grab a “stale” draft from your archive 
   i. A poem that’s “done” but you’re not satisfied with 
   ii. A draft you gave up on 
   iii. A poem you’ve been submitting for a while that isn’t getting picked up 
   
   b. Create three copies (on your computer, print, etc.) 
   i. Engage in erasure on Copy 1* 
   ii. EITHER:

   • erase again (still with copy 1), OR
   • create second erasure with copy 2

2. 
   The “About You” Exercise

   a. Choose an email, text message, doctor’s note, or other piece of writing that was not originally written for creative purposes

   b. Repeat steps from Exercise 1 section b

OK, OK. Great. But what does “engage in erasure” actually mean? How do I “engage in erasure”? There is no one “right” way, but here’s a useful starter guide: 

1. Underline (or highlight/circle) any words that sound interesting or for some reason make you want to linger
2. Do the same for any sonic patterns you may find (can be words that rhyme, consonance, etc.)
3. Do the same for any themes you may notice

4. From this word-bank:  
   a. Lay out your rules ahead of time 
   i. Will you maintain word order? 
   ii. What about punctuation? 
   iii. How long will the result be? 
   iv. Is there another form that will influence the erasure’s form? 
   (1) Why is this form appropriate? 
   
   v. Is there a maximum or minimum amount of the source you must use? 
   vi. What if you break the rules? 
   vii. How do these rules make sense in the context of form, context, and process? 
   
   b. Start by digging into the text (i.e., rules will be revealed)

   i. Underline exciting words and start to list connections/what they make you think of

   ii. Underline exciting sounds and start to list connections/what they make you think of

   iii. Some people just like to … start

    

5. As you’re working, keep a separate document to note your experience/thoughts; this will help you notice what process you are naturally gravitating to) (see notes from Zong! by M. NourbeSe Philip).

Workshop participants had dedicated time to begin their process, after which we communally reflected on the following: 

1. What method did you gravitate toward? Why?

2. What was the difference in process between the two exercises?

   a. In terms of feeling?

   b. In terms of your experience with erasure?

3. What surprised you?
4. What are you drawn to?
5. What do you want to try next?

To close, we shared some of our work and considered next steps—how could what was started in workshop be continued/expanded? What additional sources might be of use? In what other forms, beyond poetry, might we experiment with self-erasure?

I return to Zong! and M. NourbeSe Philip’s insight that the poem that is revealed had been there all along. It is romantic to assume that what is revealed in self-erasure is or had been necessarily sub- or un-conscious to the poet before its revelation, however, this is not always true. Additionally, or, alternatively, one might think about the insertion of the (or a) self as an arbiter between the original and resultant text. In her sequence “Reaching Guantánamo,” Solmaz Sharif writes what appears to be a sequence of letters between an individual incarcerated at Guantánamo Bay and their partner. These letters are very obviously engaging with erasure, as large blanks exist within the text where language is omitted—the implication being that the omitted language was both too revealing (according to the state) and simultaneously too devastating (to the lovers) to be uttered, or written, as it were, aloud. It took me years, and a conversation with writer and artist Rachel Lindsay, to learn that the letters themselves were fictive—that is, imagined and written by Sharif—and furthermore, that there was no actual erasure process as I define it, wherein a complete text is then managed and manipulated through selective omission and redaction. That instead, Sharif composed the sequences with the spaces/omissions always already there, describing these moments as “silences that come abruptly, unpredictably, illogically,” just like the redactions enacted upon actual letters to Guantánamo prisoners by the Joint Tasks Force.⁸

“Why,” Sharif asked, in another (notably, now unavailable) interview, “would I want to replicate what the state does”?⁹ She answers her own question: “Erasure may well be the closest poetry in English has gotten to role of the state.” In this way, erasure provides the poet the arguably rare opportunity to adopt—for the purpose of critique, argument, or other denunciation—the language of a given oppressive force in order to subvert it and or draw attention to its violent absurdity.

I began writing this essay two days after voters in the United States of America elected Donald Trump as president for the second time in eight years. It was easy to describe the erasures happening, or expected to happen—the striking down (erasure) of gay marriage; the overturning (erasure) of Roe v. Wade; the threatened deportation (erasure) of millions of undocumented peoples; the ongoing genocide (erasure) of Palestinians; the ongoing (erased) COVID-19 pandemic; and similarly, the re-narrativations—erasures—of various events: January 6, 2021, Trump’s 31 felonies, the mattering of misogyny and sexual assault.

I further stipulated (if oversimply) that those in the upper/ruling classes who voted for Trump did so in an act of deliberate erasure, while those already oppressed and likely to suffer further in a second Trump presidency who voted for him did so, in what I could describe for the purposes of this essay, in an act of self-erasure. How to make sense of this contingent of folks voting against their own interests? Do we pity them? Condemn them?

Months later, I maintain that those in positions of great wealth and power supporting Trump’s presidency are enacting erasure—unpoetically—in its most violent form. However, working through this essay and the accompanying requisite process of interrogation brings me to a different, if unfinished, position on those suggested to be engaged in “self-erasure.” Let me—us—differentiate their actions from poetic self-erasure, as self-erasure, according to how I define it throughout this piece, requires deliberate action of, and investigation into, the un- and/or sub-conscious. This is not to suggest that all those posited above to be victims of self-erasure—those voting for Trump and against their own interests—did so out of some inherent lack of consciousness. To say so would be patronizing, assumptive, and a projection, none of which are bases upon which I care to establish—or even suggest—a theory. Here Sharif’s logos echoes: “If I am using the words of someone outside of myself … would I be willing to read the poem in front of someone directly affected by that atrocity?” If, as Solmaz posits, “erasure … [is] the closest poetry in English has gotten to role of the state,” this is an instance where employing erasure to adopt the language of a given oppressive force in order to subvert it and/or draw attention to its violent absurdity may prove more harmful than revelatory. The adoption of the language itself may preclude any effective subversion. The poethical line is thin. Any attempt by me to define and diagnose what might lead someone who is more civically/legally oppressed than I to vote for Trump only causes harm, and enough harm has been, is being, will continue to be, done.

Let’s return to the epistle from the beginning of this essay and apply these heady ideas. What was hiding within/beneath the original, boring utterance of my epistle? 

A lot, it turns out. 

The “anonymously” written poem to an anonymous prison official became source text for more grammatically, syntactically, and visually interesting compositions hidden inside the fully fleshed version. Drawing from Srikanth Reddy’s process used in his book Voyager, I “erased” the same source text multiple times. In Reddy’s case, he “erased” secretary-general of the UN from 1972–1981 and former Nazi intelligence officer Kurt Waldheim’s memoir three times; each erasure its own self-contained section in the resulting three-part book, each with its own unique voice, form, and rules.¹⁰ My original poem was less than a page, versus Reddy’s source-text of 282 pages¹¹ (depending on the edition); hardly long enough to defend so few erased versions. Instead, I erased the poem over and over again until exhaustion, each time beginning with the original version (as opposed to starting with the most recent erased version). Exhaustion came at 39 for me. 

Now its own chapbook, To Whom It May Concern is objectively (if objectivity is ever possible in poetry) more interesting than the original. It is also far more formally experimental, and, most importantly, unpredictable. Gone is the obviousness and unarguable finality of the original piece. In its stead, spurts of language, words, repetitions, questions, and invocations that out of context may seem incomprehensible, but taken together—and when considered in terms of its process of becoming—I’d found the poem(s) “writing [themselves]” amid the poem I thought I was writing. A short sequence of these emergent poems to close:

¹Philip, M. NourbeSe. “Notanda.” Zong!, Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 2008, p. 192. 

² Darling, Kristina Marie. “‘Into the Underworld of What Is beneath the Official Narrative’: A Conversation with Sam Taylor about Poetry, Hybridity, and Erasure—Curated by Kristina Marie Darling.” Tupelo Quarterly, March 13, 2022

³G’Schwind, Stephanie. “Erasing the Self, Rescuing the Lyric: A Conversation about Self-Erasure.” Center for Publishing Blog, Colorado State University. Accessed July 18, 2016. 

⁴A tragic—if highly effective—example of this literal self-erasure can be found in Diana Khoi Nguyen’s debut collection Ghost Of, in which Nguyen acts not as erasure artist, but instead in response to an erasure already enacted. “Two years before his suicide Diana Khoi Nguyen’s brother cut his image from family photographs,” and it is into and around these haunting silhouette’s that Nguyen composes her poems, a process that, she describes, enacted grief and allowed a certain kind of “embodiment” not accessible in other forms she’d tried. Heisler, Eva. “Diana Khoi Nguyen, To Cut Out.” Asymptote Journal, March 2021

⁵Matthews, Airea D., interviewee. Zucker, Rachel, host. “Episode 43: Airea D. Matthews.” Commonplace Podcast, December 21, 2017.

⁶Lightbox Poetry and Solmaz Sharif. “Solmaz Sharif.” Lightbox Poetry, 2015.

⁷Darling, Kristina Marie. “‘Into the Underworld of What Is beneath the Official Narrative’: A Conversation with Sam Taylor about Poetry, Hybridity, and Erasure—Curated by Kristina Marie Darling.” Tupelo Quarterly, March 13, 2022.

⁸Lightbox Poetry and Solmaz Sharif. “Solmaz Sharif.” Lightbox Poetry, 2015.

⁹From an interview originally published in The Volta.

¹⁰Reddy, Srikanth. Voyager. University of California Press, 2011.

¹¹Waldheim, Kurt. In the Eye of the Storm: A Memoir. Adler & Adler, 1986.

Additional Resources

https://axonjournal.com.au/issues/12-2/poetry-self-erasure-and-trace

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10991-023-09346-6