Join us for this workshop where we will dive into the world of erasure poetry (aka blackout poetry), a unique form of found poetry where we remove/cover/erase/obscure words from a text to create new interpretations and poetic expressions. Erasure has the power to make the familiar unfamiliar, to explore what is and isn’t said in a text. We’ll start by talking about the processes poets use for creating erasures and looking at the work of some well-known erasure artists. Then, in conversation with The Scarlet Letter, we’ll give it a try! Basic materials will be provided including markers and copies of the book, but feel free to bring any materials of your own!
M.P. Carver is a poet and visual artist from Salem, MA. She is Director of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival, miCrO-Founder of Molecule: a tiny lit mag, and teaches creative and digital writing at Salem State University. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, Mantis, Jubilat, and Love’s Executive Order, among others. She has received funding from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Essex Community Foundation. In 2023 her poem “In Vitro” was named a finalist in the Connecticut River Review’s Experimental Poetry Contest, and in 2022 her poem “You & God & I” was awarded the New England Poetry Club’s E.E. Cummings Prize. Her chapbook, Selachipmorpha, was published by Incessant Pipe in 2015, and a chapbook with Lily Poetry Review Books, Hard Up, was released in early 2025.