Quotes of Mary Ruefle on Erasure Poetry

While working on my bibliographic essay on Mary Ruefle’s erasure book An Incarnation of the Now, I came across this article which offered her perspective on the value and merit of [her] erasure poetry. I have extracted the most interesting passages and put them here to hopefully help us answer some of the questions brought up in class about homage/sabotage/originality/art vs. text…

1. Her definition of erasure poetry:“An erasure is the creation of a new text by disappearing the old text that surrounds it. I don’t consider the pages to be poems, but I do think of them as poetry, especially in sequence and taken as a whole; when I finish an erasure book I feel I have written a book of poetry without a single poem in it, and that appeals to me.The books have been called “found poems” but I don’t consider them as such.

   A found poem is a text found in the world, taken out of its worldly context, and labeled a poem. I certainly didn’t “find” any of these pages, I made them in my head, just as I do my other work. In the erasures I can only choose words out of all the words on a given page, while writing regularly I can choose from all the words in existence. In that sense, the erasures are like a “form” –I am restricted by certain rules. I have resisted formal poetry my whole life, but at last found a form I can’t resist. It is like writing my eyes instead of my hands.”

2. On autonomy, originality, and performing erasure on your own words (aka revision):

“And most of all, I am chagrined by those who think it is fun and easy and run out and buy a book and then run to me and show me what they’ve done, seeking my approval–this has happened at Vermont College–or by those who endlessly find little books and send them to me in the hopes I will erase them (unless they are Larry Sutin, god bless and endorse him).

You see, I am not encouraging you to do this because it is to me exactly like art–it is a private journey; we can be inspired and we can be influenced, but the predominant note of any journey must be found in the quiet unfolding of our own time on earth.

That said, I will say this: eight times out of ten, an erasure of a poem, made by the author of that poem, will be better than the original poem. It is sometimes called revision, but of course you cannot actually read the original poem, you can only look at the words.”

3. A philosophical metaphor on life and erasure:

“And that, my friend, is the art of erasure, as it is enacted in your own life, and all lives: life is much, much more than is necessary, and much, much more than any of us can bear, so we erase it or it erases us, we ourselves are an erasure of everything we have forgotten or don’t know or haven’t experienced, and on our deathbed, even that limited and erased “whole” becomes further diminished, if you are lucky you will remember the one word water, all others having been erased; if you are lucky you will remember one place or one person, but no one will ever, ever read on their deathbed, the whole text, intact and in order.”

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