[Curtis Gale Weeks]

A fan of the poet Joe Wenderoth, I happened to stumble upon the web site for Wave Books, publisher of his third book of poetry and his forthcoming fourth book of poetry, while doing a search for poems I might use in a blog post I'm planning.

Wave Books, I discovered, has a section on its web site for erasure poetry drills—really, a resource for doing some erasure poetry. Multiple source texts are listed at this link: http://erasures.wavepoetry.com/sources.php . You can click on a source, and you'll be taken to a page with that source text and be able to click on individual words and punctuation to "erase" portions of the text, creating your own erasure poem.

Because some interest in the subject of erasure poetry has been expressed on Eratosphere, I thought this would be a good chance to examine the process in more detail.

For this drill—and/or for amusement—please use one of the source texts listed at the Wave Books site to create an erasure poem, and post your poem here. Please note which source text was used, but do not include the source text here—either a note about the text or a link to that text on Wave Books's site would be best.

Comments about the process used on particular erasure poems posted here, the choices made, and general observations on creating erasure poems—especially relating to the efforts posted here—are welcome. But broad polemical arguments about erasure poetry should probably be reserved for the recent General Talk thread in which the subject already appeared or a new thread on General Talk specifically to address the issue.

I'll start things off with an erasure poem I made using the Wave Books site.