Erasure Poems

These erasures are created from pages of Fascinating Womanhood, a 1963 “self-improvement” manual for wives, with whose author I (once) shared a religious background. It urged women to suppress their intelligence and capability, and make themselves childlike, dependent, and “feminine.” I first encountered it in the library of the religious institute across the street from the university, during my first year in college. I penciled a faint protest inside the cover and returned it to the shelf — thus began my alteration of the book. Decades later, I found a paperback copy at a thrift shop, and bought it, intending to burn it. In 2020 I determined to transform every leaf of the book, to create the book I would have wished to find in its place. At this point in the project, I have transformed every leaf – in many cases, several times, using additional copies. But the book I am creating requires me to sacrifice earlier versions of pages, in order to grapple not only with the misogyny inherent in the source text, but also with how I have accepted and perpetuated my own erasure. The erasures here represent attempts to mine a given page for language that might bring me closer to self-understanding, toward a more actual freedom.

Source text: Fascinating Womanhood by Helen Andelin, originally self-published in 1963. These erasures were composed upon pages of the mass-market paperback, published by Random House, 1982.

LISA HUFFAKER creates poetry, collage, and assemblage. Her poetry appears or is forthcoming in 32 Poems, Diode, DIAGRAM, CTRL+V, Tupelo Quarterly, Phoebe, Cincinnati Review, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere. She was recently a finalist for Dallas Poet Laureate. Her erasure transformation of a 1963 marriage manual was featured at TU Delft and Cornell Tech’s 3rd Workshop on Obfuscation.