Erasure poetry, the most common form of which is also called blackout poetry, is a poetic form in which a poet blacks out or in some way erases words from a preexisting source to create new poems.
Erasure poetry comes in several forms other than blackout poetry. Poet Erin Dorney identified six styles of erasure poetry: blackout; crossout, crossing out words to create a new poem; computer, using computer software to add or remove lines; cut out, using a knife to cut words out of paper; covered up, covering up the original text with another material (paper, sand, rice, etc.); and retyped, retyping the original text to make it look like a conventional, traditional poem, leaving space where the original text used to be.
An early appearance of erasure poetry was in 1965 when artist and poet Doris Cross created “Dictionary Columns,” in which she used painting and drawings on a dictionary to create poems. Other examples of erasure poetry include “Freeland: An Erasure” by Leigh Sugar; renowned poet Tracy K. Smith’s poems “Declaration,” which stems from the Declaration of Independence, and “The Greatest Personal Privation,” from notes and letters about slaveholding; and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, which uses court documents about the 18th-century slave ship that threw more than 120 enslaved Africans overboard in order to collect insurance money.