Erasure

The defrocking Prufrock meme that is going around is pretty neat. That's a poem that's tough to erase. The original is still stubbornly there in every version I've seen. For me anyway. As Charlie Jensen mention's in the comment box to Peter Pereira's version, two possibilities for a new poem created this way are transcendence of and comment on Eliot's poem.

I have experimented with erasing poems off and on, having picked up the idea from Robert Rauchenberg's "Erased de Kooning."


Rauschenberg's "Erased de Kooning Drawing," 1953.

Though I am sure the idea was not a new one, it was new to me. The goal in my experiments was to take a poem with strong lines and erase them to leave only very faint traces of the original. In Rauschenberg's piece the de Kooning is almost-not-quite completely gone. Where Rauschenberg's piece is about the resonant absence after an erasure (though it is also about many other things, such as value), my experiments seemed to reveal something about persistence. I realize that is probably vague, and in any case, very subtle. Erasure experiments are an interesting exercise in reading, too--a way to discover what is irreducible about a poem.

Here is one of the first best ones I did.

Do you recognize the original there at all?

Sometimes I will also use this erasure experiment to begin a poem, but then I give myself permission to stray from the rules (such as using only words or phrases from the original in the order they appeared) as far as I like. So the original poem becomes just a jumping off point and the new poem a wholly new thing.

But I ain't about to cop to which of mine or which of theirs.

Rauschenberg's piece is more radical, by far. He had to destroy the de Kooning, reduce it to just a once-was. Kinda primal, ain't it?