It was just after lunch when the poetry graduate student teacher dumped a pile of discount books onto the table. There were only ten of us, all high school students, sitting in an air-conditioned classroom of some Columbia University building. She handed each student a random book plus some Sharpies. I remember mine had yellowed pages and chewed-up corners. The lesson that day was on erasure poetry. She demonstrated this by ripping a page out of a book and blacking paragraphs of text until only a handful of words were visible. At once, it felt thrilling and blasphemous to be permitted to destroy literature, even if it was books no one wanted. That August afternoon provided plenty of light through several open windows as we began. Sounds of ripping paper and the strong scent of markers filled the room. I don’t remember the title of the book I had nor the poem I created. Yet. I never forgot the joy of taking words from a page to create something new.
Back then, I had no idea what genre I preferred or the writing style I wanted to pursue. Everything was new, and that summer felt like I was jumping into the deep end without floaties. But I never stopped writing. A few months after that summer, I was touring liberal arts colleges and universities. I think I was at Franklin and Marshal when my mother and I escaped a strong manure scent by entering a bookstore. There was a tub of uncorrected proofs soon to be published. On top of the pile, in plain cream-colored canvas, lay The Truth According to Us by Annie Barrows. I had never read her work and instantly decided its blank cover meant it would be the perfect specimen to practice my erasure poetry. When we got to our hotel, I ripped the family tree page out and used it to prevent the black ink from bleeding onto the next page.
The next four years of my writing always began with that uncorrected proof and a thick black Sharpie in hand. From page to page, the story of a woman named Bird and her overbearing lover, Fox, started to take shape. One day, I knocked on the door of my poetry professor Jennifer Chang. I sat down, and explained how I wanted to apply to the GWU honors program where Creative Writing majors could write a thesis. I took the uncorrected proof out of my bag and handed it to her. Thankfully, she loved it, and the next year was spent formulating a manuscript. I began immersing myself in as many erasure books as possible, like Jen Bervin’s Nets, Tom Phillip’ A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel, M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and many more. I loved it. Yet, Bird’s life was only a story with no personal connection or deep meaning. It didn’t feel like it had a purpose at first. That was until I read Cecily Parks’ article “On Erasure.” She provided examples of women’s erasure over history and discussed her unease toward erasing Wild Green Things in the City by Anne Ophelia Dowden. She felt the project further erased Anne instead of providing a way to recover her and decided to stop. I was writing during the Trump administration, and it felt like the country was reverting to a time when women were accessories, not individuals. Like her and all those other women, I knew what it meant to be erased. Writing Bird was the first-time writing felt necessary for me, as if her voice needed to exist. Since Barrows wrote a historical fiction based on West Virginia in 1930s America, I used letters written by unidentified farm women from the Great Depression and an etiquette book. The combination meant I could include many women’s voices, experiences, and societal expectations to tell the story of Bird. I doubted readers would recognize the source material culled from one hundred years, but so many experiences regarding love and marriage are timeless. The final product was “he to Us,” a seventy-four-page collection of erasure poems using materials from three sources.
While it is rough and ready, that manuscript taught me a lot about poetry and how to connect with published literature. Bird’s story cannot rediscover the identities of all those women who were erased, and not every erasure uncovers a hidden truth. So, I had to completely alter how I approached the process of writing. Before, I had written to enjoy the process of creating out of nothing imaginary characters and describing events I’ve never experienced. Now, it was something personal and the physical space of text was imperative. I needed to learn how to encompass multiple woman’s fragmented selves into a singular, commanding voice from pages of words I already had. I made a Frankenstein-esque collage of source materials, so that, even if the manuscript were to be un-erased, it would be incoherent. Readers could never fully recover these women, just like in real life.
Today, as I finish my MFA, erasure embeds itself into my writing style. It drove me to choose a hybrid master’s program as I still love mixing genres and allowing my writing to be as experimental as it wants. My graduate thesis is a hybrid memoir on my need to fill the absence of the dead and the estranged by piecing together memories with the help of found materials, like emails, text messages, and interviews. It explores the rifts in familial relationships and moves through the process of grieving loved ones. At times, the loss of family is emphasized dramatically through a similar erasure to Bervin’s with greyed original text and selected bold-faced words. However, mourning is also a gradual process over time, represented through poems which physically fade away on the page. Like all those years ago, I still approach writing by considering the physical aspect of the text. My narration, as well, is not solely from my experiences as I draw upon what I learned writing Bird’s voice, that I can create plurality through found material.
My series of crossword poems particularly captures this relationship between erasure and grieving family. Crosswords are homes for a set of words, and the clues define their essence. I use the crossword as a metaphor for my family and home. Each clue unpacks a relevant word representing a key moment or object associated with my family’s experiences. However, my crossword is never complete at any given time, and in every iteration, it slowly falls apart. When we lose loved ones, the structure of our family changes and continually shifts. If it hadn’t been for that summer class all those years ago, I do not think I could articulate these concepts in such an experimental form without erasure, and my writing process would be completely different.
Annalise recently received her MFA in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago. Her work is published in Allium’s Spring 2023 print edition.