Easter is predicated on the empty set, so here’s a little art and more made of blanks:
Artist Ariana Boussard Reifel does the only sensible thing to this white supremacist text by cutting out every word.
Here’s the history of erasure poetics at The Jacket
What survives of art inevitably ends up as artifact. From sculpture to scripture, the stories we tell tend to outlast the audience and the storyteller both. They survive, scratched into the surface of our world where they are translated and adapted or else buried beneath that very surface and forgotten. It seems only natural then, that the world’s first erasure poetry was authored by the elements themselves and comes to us via the remnants of weathered stone carvings and papyrus scrolls; artifacts dutifully discovered, reassembled and retranslated by the scholars of every successive generation.
A Humument Oracle for today:
An erasure made from a book the library was throwing away, Vanya by Myrna Grant:
Erasures made by Eric Elshtain from the May 2011 Poetry Magazine.
Here’s one I made from John Donne’s Holy Sonnet, “As due by many titles I resign”:
Thou rise and for Thine own work despair;
See: thou lovest well, yet choose me.
And finally, here’s the real Erasure getting country all over this classic song, live in Nashville