Erasure
Poetry
Project

Teaching Erasure I - Interview with Mahshid Mayar: “reading before/as/while writing”

As principle investigator of the DFG-funded project W( )les and ( )holes: Politically Engaged Erasure Poetry in Twenty-First-Century United States, Dr. Mahshid Mayar researches and thinks deeply about erasure, which has also translated into several classes and workshops for students. In this interview, Dr. Mayar talks about how she introduces erasure as a mode of reading, writing, and remaking to students and engages them in applying erasure techniques themselves.

What is most interesting to you about erasure from a literary, cultural, intermedial, or political vantage point?

What continues to intrigue me about erasure poetry and arts is the way it persistently unsettles the category of the “original” while foregrounding the extent to which all texts are already embedded in dense, at-times unforeseen networks of intertextuality, citation, and archival memory. In this sense, erasure does not simply participate in intertextual play but rather intensifies and exposes it as a practice in doctoring the language of the “source texts” it emanates from. I am particularly interested in how erasure operates across literary, visual, and documental registers, positioning itself as a cross-generic and intermedial form that resists stable categorization. This is why I have conceptualized erasure in line with Jahan Ramazani’s notion of “poetry and its others,” understanding it as a site where the poetic enters into an upsetting (therefore exciting) commerce with adjacent forms, archives, and epistemologies. From this perspective, I view erasure as a mode of textual disruption and intertextual layering that not only reflects but actively intervenes in the cultural and political conditions under which texts—and the archives they inhabit—are produced and received.

What inspired you to design an erasure poetry workshop for students, and how did you approach planning it, both in terms of materials and learning goals?

The workshop emerged as an extension of my broader investment in erasure as a practice that stages poetry’s engagement with the documentary and the archival, particularly in the context of U.S. empire and its textual residues. I designed it as the culminating assignment for a seminar dedicated to erasure poetry in the US context, where students were invited to move from critical analysis to their own creative-critical interventions. The in-class component was deliberately anchored in a discussion of Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas, especially its response to S.J.Res.14 which we approached as a paradigmatic example of how poetic practice can interrogate the limits and violences of official documentation. Students then continued their work independently at home, producing erasures alongside short reflective essays in which they discussed their positionalities, methodological choices, and critical investments. The final step was to hold a student-led installation at the University of Cologne in winter 2022/23. The exhibition, “This is NOT an apology!” in effect translated the seminar’s concerns with erasure poetry and arts into a public-facing, spatialized engagement with US history and literature, foregrounding erasure as both a poetic and performative intervention. 

The fact that the works remain on display until today underscores the extent to which the project exceeded the temporal bounds of the classroom and entered into an ongoing dialogue with its institutional surroundings.

How do you understand erasure poetry as a creative or critical practice? What did you hope students would gain from engaging with this form?

I understand erasure as a practice that collapses the distinction between the creative and the critical, precisely because it is predicated on sustained, meticulous engagement with a pre-existing text and because it functions as both material and constraint. Each act of erasure begins with what might be described as an almost forensic mode of reading—attentive, recursive, and attuned to the textual and ideological structures that underwrite the source document. From there, the process of removal functions as a form of textual subversion that operates within the limits imposed by the source text, compelling the writer to negotiate meaning through selection, omission, and re-configuration. Erasure thus exemplifies a heightened form of constrained creativity, one that renders visible the politics of language, authorship, and documentation. My aim was for students to experience this tension firsthand and to recognize how working with the fixed lexical and syntactic field of an already existing text can open up new avenues for critical inquiry. Ultimately, I hoped they would come to see erasure not only as a method of composition but as a mode anchored in re-reading and re-imagining the archive itself.

What strategies or techniques did you introduce for creating the erasures? Did you emphasize visual, linguistic, or thematic approaches, or a combination of these?

After exposure to and critical discussions of several other examples of erasure poetry and arts, the workshop participants worked with erasure as an inherently multimodal practice that was meant to encourage them to think across textual, visual, and material dimensions of meaning-making. I introduced a range of techniques—white-out, blackout, strike-through, and experiments with textual transparency—as part of an erasure “toolbox” for engaging the source text as both document and surface. At the same time, the participants also viewed erasure as a creative mode of “reading before/as/while writing” that operates through processes of layering and fragmentation. Students were therefore invited to incorporate additional visual elements, similarly to what Tom Phillips did in A Humument (1966–2016). One especially striking example involved a student who covered a great proportion of the apology’s text with the image of a large, old-fashioned safe marked by blood-like stains, a gesture that powerfully materialized the themes of secrecy, containment, and violence that underpin the archival document. 

Such interventions highlighted the ways erasure can function as a site of audiovisual and conceptual experimentation, where the boundaries between reading, writing, and viewing become productively blurred.

How did students feel about erasing text and how did the act of erasure influence students’ sense of authorship and voice?

Students’ reflections frequently returned to the ethical and epistemological stakes of engaging with texts that are themselves implicated in histories of colonial violence and archival silencing. In responding to Long Soldier’s stellar book-length work, many grappled with their own positionalities as students of American Studies with diverse backgrounds—German, Turkish, Arab, and so on—encountering the legacies of settler colonialism in the US context from an inevitably mediated perspective. This awareness often translated into a heightened sensitivity to the act of erasure as both an intervention into and a negotiation with the archive as the participants raised questions about authority, appropriation, and the limits of representation. 

At the same time, the requirement to publicly exhibit their work reframed the assignment as a form of creative-critical participation in broader discourses about history, memory, and documentation. Students described this shift as transformative for their sense of authorship and voice, as it positioned them not merely as interpreters of texts but as contributors to an ongoing process of re-mapping and re-imagining archival memory through poetic practice. 

The subsequent workshops I’ve designed at the University of Innsbruck—which will culminate in a student-led art installation as part of our upcoming “Making Sense of America” conference in July 2026—have all grown out of that initial momentum, and that first workshop experience still remains a genuine highlight for me.