Erasure Poems

I'm a big fan of Mary Ruefle's wonderful and tiny little book, A Little White Shadow. This is her book of "erasure poems." The poet takes prose texts and whites out uninteresting words, leaving only words that form a new poem that has utterly transformed the original text.

Here's a link to a clever site set up by her publisher, Wave Books:

Try your own hand at "erasures." I'll list some poems my students have written here:

“Like Winter” by Ozakh

summer together?
intense!
I remember the ocean
how beautiful that was...
like another planet…,
it’s funny we’d be a team, we’d argue,
always did.
We grew up
in one second.
doesn’t feel very different.
didn’t feel very different.


you
felt
like

the winter.