Erasure poetry

Writers and visual artists have adopted this form both to achieve a range of cognitive or symbolic effects and to focus on the social or political meanings of erasure.

Doris Cross appears to have been among the earliest to utilize this technique, beginning in 1965 with her "Dictionary Columns" book art.

Jonathan Safran Foer's 2010 Tree of Codes is a book-length erasure of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz.

[9] Safran-Foer's approach to the Holocaust as an "unrepresentable subject" recalls the use of negative space in the poetry of Dan Pagis.

[16] Through working to erase existing texts such as Treaty 8[17] in "NDN Coping Mechanisms" by Billy-Ray Belcourt and "Totem Poles" by Canadian ethnographer Marius Barbeau in "The Place of Scraps" by Jordan Abel these two poets "make and unmake texts"[17] the way Indigenous histories have been made and unmade by colonialist influences.