In reference to Robert Rauschenberg's Erased de Kooning Drawing 1953, the American painter, sculptor, and printmaker Jasper Johns used the term "additive subtraction." Using this concept of additive subtraction applied to text, this course will consider how erasure texts serve to address, challenge, mock, disrupt, highlight, abstract, and bring into sharper focus or contrast, the sociopolitical realities that define our lives. What makes a successful erasure poem? What visual and spatial considerations go into making a work of erasure, and how do we begin to approach it? How have erasurists used the form to redress other erasures—of marginalized & colonized peoples, of history, of the current moment in the necropolitic of white supremacy?

In this two-day workshop, we will consider some of these questions, work on drafting two erasure/found poems from prompts, and give and receive feedback on work generated. We will ground our analysis in the work of writers Candace Williams, Chase Berggrun, Jordan Abel, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Srikanth Reddy, among others. In addition, we will discuss works by visual artists Ken Gonzales-Day, Jesse Chun, Jennif(f)er Tamayo, Jenny Holzer, and Titus Kaphar.