Mohr Visiting Poets

Each year, the Creative Writing Program welcomes a distinguished poet to teach a Stanford writing seminar to undergraduates. These unique classes are kept small--limited to no more than 15 students--and they focus on a subject of the poet's expertise and choosing. The poet also holds a public reading and colloquium. These seminars and events are made possible with the generous support of Lawrence and Nancy Mohr.

English 192V The Practice of Poetic Erasure

• Offered: Winter 2027

• Instructor: Prof. Lewis

• Satisfies the intermediate/advanced poetry requirement

• Enrollment granted on priority basis. To be considered for enrollment, please submit the Course Preference Form

Choose a book - any book. Choose a song or film, choose a building, painting, or an epic. Now, imagine erasing most of the words (or images from that book, film, space) in order to create, or discover, a wholly new different story: your story, or another's story, some expression the original writer or artist themselves could not have conceived of when they created their text originally. This, crudely, is the definition of poetic erasure. Found poetry. If it sounds vile, it is. It can also be brilliant, emboldened, politically exacting, tender, historically revelatory, sublime, and thrilling. More often than not, it is also heartbreaking. 

Through weekly slide shows, readings, discussions, and workshops, we will explore the history of contemporary poetic erasure, placing emphasis on what might have been - and what could be - if we read a book from any myriad of directions other than ways the author intended. Indeed, one of the best unforeseen strengths (gifts?) of poetic erasure is that it makes us keenly aware of history's unspoken often unconscious intentions. What might have happened, for example, if Shakespeare were a woman, a woman who decided to cut just a few more lines from her genius sonnets, choosing to create evocative early-modern avant-garde exploration instead? Or what might have taken place if a few of the English Romantics, in a communal renunciation of authorship, mashed all their poems into one much shorter, but anonymous, collective text? Who or what does the author become then? What if a Victorian writer had painted over the majority of her own novel, blocking out most of the words with opaque paint instead, dismissing altogether the habit of narrative cohesion? What does a "book" mean then? What is a "poem"? And what do these aesthetic gestures represent symbolically about our entwined cultures and histories? Perhaps most importantly, what occurs to our own linguistic indoctrination and unconscious historical intentions when we practice erasure ourselves?

In this workshop, via a discussion of desire, war, expansionism, we will examine contemporary poetic erasures in order to focus on the means by which history - often unconsciously - saturates our literature and our own writing. By repositioning erasure within the broader context of contemporary American poetry, this workshop will explore how poetic erasure offers writers a dynamic tool by which to push language, and perhaps most importantly, to be pushed by language. The goal of this workshop is to explore how an erasure practice can enable writers and artists to play more seriously, more openly and rigorously. Through weekly discussions, writing exercises, and workshops, participants will be encouraged to uncover - and utilize - the historical and aesthetic gestures at work, often unconsciously and ahistorically, within English itself. Besides the usual requirements (astute participation, passionate engagement, regular attendance, a harmless and equally painless 10 minute oral report), in this workshop the main emphasis will be placed on students creating and workshopping their own original poetic erasures.