The American Academy of Poets goes all out for poetry month each year — while doing its best to keep poetry on the American culture’s radar the rest of the year. One of AAP’s poetry-month projects that caught my attention recently is the “Poem in Your Pocket Day” (April 30 this year). The premise was simple: carry a poem with you all day and share with everyone willing to listen. The Academy even offered a printable small poetry book of three poems that can slip in your pocket. All three poems are fine, short poems. But one stood out to me, mostly for the simple creative genius behind the idea of the poem and how the poet carries out this idea word by word, line by line.
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The poem is Rosamond S. King’s “Do Not Trust the Eraser.” I might have gravitated toward this one because I once wrote an eraser poem — and because, being mildly or not so mildly dyslexic, I’m constant going back over my writing to fix the dumb errors — all of this separate from my other tendency to revise poems excessively, sometimes to the point of ruin.
King understands this thoroughly:
Do Not Trust the Eraser
Do not trust the erasers. Prefer
Crossed out, scribbled over monuments
To something once thought correct
. Instead: colors, transparencies
Track changes, versions, iterations
. How else might you return
After discards, attempts
And mis takes, to your
Original genius
?
I love both the truth girding this poem and the execution — with mistakes deliberately left in. No doubt the mistakes are fabricated for a point here. And as a reader you may be itching to fix them. Move those periods where they belong. Repair “mis takes.” You might want to wrestle with the syntax in the line that starts “Instead:”. But by leaving it as is, you can feel the original genius in the idea better, I think, than if you have fixed all the errors. You feel the enthusiasm behind the writing of the poem.
There’s a lot of seriousness in contemporary American poetry. It makes sense, given how seriously unnerving life can be in our current times — with the rise of AI, the wealth divides, the political madness, the metastasizing racism, the threats of and engagement in war, the environmental disasters of our own making unfolding before our eyes. Etc. But on some level we need to find our joys and connections in life. We need to have some kind of faith in what humanity can do. Poems like “Do Not Trust the Eraser” can’t change things alone, but it can remind us that while we’re not perfect, we do have moments of original, creative genius, and these moments are vital to our experiences on Earth. This, I think, is an idea worth sharing.
Rosamond S. King’s books include All the Rage (Nightboat, 2021) and Rock | Salt | Stone (Nightboat Books, 2017). She is the winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Poetry, as well as the award-winning monograph Island Bodies: Transgressive Sexualities in the Caribbean Imagination (University of Florida, 2015). King is also the chair and of the English department at Brooklyn College and served as the guest editor of The American Academy of Poet’s Poem-a-Day project in June of 2024.