#napowrimo #poetry
And now for today’s (optional) prompt! Erasure poetry — also known as blackout poetry — is written by taking an existing text and erasing or blacking out individual words. Here’s a great explainer with examples, and you’ll find another here. Some folks have written whole books of erasures/blackouts, including Chase Berggrun’s R E D (which is based on Dracula), Jen Bervin’s Nets (which is based on Shakespeare’s sonnets), and what is one of the grand-daddies of erasures as a form, Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (which is based on Paradise Lost). Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own erasure/blackout poem. You could use a page from a favorite book, a magazine, what have you. It can be especially fun to play with a book you don’t know, particularly one that deals with an unfamiliar topic. If you’d like to go that route, maybe you’ll find something of interest in the thousands of scanned books at the Internet Archive? Feel free to maintain the whitespace of the original text (as is traditional for erasures/blackouts . . . if anything can be called traditional about them) or to pluck words/phrases from your chosen source material and rearrange them.
Happy writing (or erasing!)
Erasure Poem - The Sadness of the Zoo
We are moving into
a curious moment,
it is a religious moment,
here is the danger;
people will want to obey
the voice of Authority.
The sadness of the zoo
will fall upon society.
For fear of reprisals,
everything will live
behind a joke. If you
think Freud is dishonoured
now, and Einstien and
Hemingway, just wait.
A Jerusalem hidden in
Jerusalem. I will enter the
innermost place, to entreat,
to plead, to justify. Have no
doubt, we will be seeing and
hearing from people like myself.
©🦊VixenOfVerse, 2026
**Taken from "Book of Longing" by Leonard Cohen, Page 34**
VIXEN of VERSE 