A Poem for Every Page of DFW's Infinite Jest

"For poet Jenni B. Baker, David Foster Wallace’s postmodern epic on tennis, recovery and entertainment, is text material for her poetry," writes Elizabeth Flock at PBS NewsHour about Baker's erasure project. "Since 2013, Baker has been making poems out of 'Infinite Jest' by erasing much of the text, and creating a new piece of writing from what’s left behind." More:

“It’s a challenge when working with a source text, because you want to interpret a text in a way that’s new and inventive, and not a poetic retelling of the original thought,” she said. “While traditional poets start with an idea and find the words, with erasure you start with the words and find the idea.”

Baker has done erasure work before, including an extended series of erasures of a 1960s Boy Scout handbook, and a commentary on the recent election where she blacked out text from the Grimm Fairy Tales. But erasure of Wallace’s work felt like it had a special significance, she said, because of the author’s death by suicide in 2008 after he struggled with depression for much his life.

“Part of what drew me to this project was feelings of grief about [Wallace’s] suicide,” said Baker. “Because you have this feeling that somebody wrote this thing that you loved, that they will be no more, and that there will not be anything more like this. Death is a form of erasure — we are all erased. So it felt like a fitting a tribute to him.”

In the end, Baker plans to do a poem for every page of the 1,079-page novel....

Find some of those poems at PBS NewsHour. More about this project at and more about this project at Erasing Infinite.