Two Erasures
— Andrew Sargus Klein
Erasure poetry enjoys a deep and complex history. It can be joyous and whimsical, a potential low barrier to entry for new poets looking to expand their understanding of the possibilities of experimental forms. But the heat of erasure is in its inherent political angle. I will never be able to look at a poem formed by blacked-out text without seeing a political document, something stricken from the record, something hidden. The inverse works, too. What is hidden by a larger context is revealed. The erasure poem converses with, repudiates, or perhaps uplifts the text from which it was carved.
Sarah Lyn Rogers has two erasures in the recent issue of Dream Pop Press, and they both resonate, albeit in different ways. Both come from pages of On the Road, about as ubiquitous a piece of American literature as it comes. I want to focus on the first erasure. Rogers’ short poem, surrounded by a deep read that hides all but the 17 words that make up the poem, pinpoints an insidious reality of patriarchy—how it so often forces women to apologize (for anything, at any time, really), to doubt themselves and the reach of their presence in the wider world. “She apologized / like all women who live / voraciously” is cutting and weary at the same time.
The second half of the poem finds an extraordinary moment of uplift—“in the fiction that / the / riotous day / was over.” The “riotous day”—something chaotic and colorful and charged—as not being over, perhaps something that never ends, is almost joyful. The sea of red is violent and sensual; the surrounding text a well-known tale of overt and overly masculine narratives that do little good in the name of women; the poem, a small thread, rising from these backdrops and finding its own self, unapologetically.