The Frank Skinner Show - Frank Skinner's Poetry Podcast: Erasure Poetry

Episode Date: April 22, 2026

Frank explores poems stowed away in prose, as revealed by Nicole Sealey and Emma Filtness. The collections referenced are “The Ferguson Report: An Erasure” by Nicole Sealey and “This Savage Language” by Emma Filtness. The poems referenced are “Page 260” and “Page 5”. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Frank Skinner's poetry podcast. This particular episode is a bit unusual because rather than looking at a specific poem, that I will be looking at some specific poems, I'm looking at a sort of genre. So come with me on that. It's exciting. I got a gift from a friend of mine called Kerry and she's an artist. And it was a page from a play. I can't quite tell whether it's from George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion

or whether it's from the musical adaptation of that play, which is Lerner and Lois, My Fair Lady. Either way, it's got Eliza Doolittle and Professor Higgins and all those characters. And Kerry has blocked out, not completely so you can still see it, but most of the text, she's painted over the text. And what she's left in clear black print is just this. Act two, she's firm, the troubles beginning. So that's all that is easily readable.

And it seems to be, I think, a feminist statement. Act two maybe is the age we live in now. She's firm, the troubles beginning. It's all about the struggle. It's all about men like Professor Higgins having to realize that they can't just take women off the street and teach them out to speak proper. It's a beautiful-looking thing and I suppose that is the main thing is it looks great, but also there's something deeper going on there. And it reminded me I went to the Forward Prize ceremony in 2021, the Forward Prize being a, major poetry prize. And there was a woman there called Nicole Seeley. And Nicole Seeley was reading an

extract from a book of hers called the Ferguson report, Anna Raja. Now, the Ferguson report, the original Ferguson report, is a report done by the United States Department of Justice. It's a report on, I'll read it, police and judicial practices in Ferguson, Missouri. And the report came out, I think, as a result of the killing of an young unarmed black man called Michael Brown in 2014. And what Nicole Seeley did was take this big, long, details, very official report. and she found poetry in it, just like my friend Kerry got rid of a lot of the words and just took out the one she wanted and highlighted those. That's what Nicole Seeley did, but on a much grander scale, she took the entire report, this big, wordy, quite scary document, and she went searching for poetry in it. So on that night, when I heard a read, she had taken an extract from the whole collection,

which she was calling page 22 to page 29, which was page 22 to page 29 of the report. And it's stunning. On the night, it was quite a harrowing but beautiful experience hearing a read it. But in order to really get it, you have to see in situ. You have to see all this grey wordage around it, all this official ease, and then just these highlighted black print words that she's managed to find in the document. So I'll give you an example of this erasure poem. Arase your poem, obviously, because most of it has been erased. Not completely erased, though. And that's kind of what I love about it.

So if we take the beginning, it begins there against the eavesdrop of night, which already is a beautiful poetic idea, the eavesdrop of night. And so the idea, I think, that the atmosphere is, it's all about secrecy and suspicion and on ease and mistrust. Everything seems to be an eavesdrop. Be careful what you're doing. Be careful what you're saying. You don't know if it was out there. So that, they're against the eavesdrop of night. The against the eavesdrop of night comes from the midst of two very official sentences. read you the whole things. Don't worry. It's not as long as you think it's going to be. Issuing a preliminary injunction against the use of state eavesdropping statute to prevent the recording of public police activities. So very formal, very official. And out of that,

she's just taken those words against the eavesdrop and of. But even more interestingly, I think the next sentence, recognising a First Amendment right to film police carrying out their public duties, all she's taken from that is the N, the last N of First Amendment, and then the IGH of right to form the word night. So from those two sentences from the Ferguson report, we get against the eavesdrop of night. and that's how it works. Sometimes she'll take a phrase, sometimes she'll take a word,

but sometimes just letters, individual letters, to spell out what she wants to get. And it makes it this sort of fresh black print escaping from all this grey prose around it, all this official language and jargon and lots of meticulous cross-referencing. It's like it can't contain the poetry that's in it.

It sort of gives you the idea that maybe any official document has got poetry hiding away in it like some sort of stowa way. And I find that very exciting. She talked about the process. I really like this quote. This is a quote from Nicole Seeley. She said, striking through whole sections of the document felt physical. like ripping out drywall and taking the document down to its studs. And it's a building image that she's got there.

Dry wall being, I suppose, what we would call plasterboard. So it's like ripping the plasterboard off and taking the document down to its studs means like it's bare metal or sometimes wooden structure, its framework. So it's like stripping the walls of a house to find out what the house really is, what the structure of it is, what the truth of the house is, if you like. And that's what she's done with this document, this poetry hiding in the Ferguson report. Okay, so it comes with no punctuation, no real line breaks. You have to do a bit of work on it to find out where the

sentences you feel should end and where the commas should be. But the tension between the official voice and the poetic one, I think it was great. It sort of pulls the poetry around and it gives it a sort of unsettling rhythm. You're sort of searching for punctuation that isn't there. And also, it slows down the way you read. You are turning pages to get through just a couple of lines. I'm going to read you someone and then I think you'll get a sense of that sort of. of that unsettling rhythm. So let's go back to that first bit and give you a bit more.

So the bit I'm going to read is over, what, four, five, four pages, but most of those pages are slightly erased grey print with a line through it as well to make us certain of where the poetry is. a poetry in this clear black print that's been raised up, raised up from the Ferguson report.

Here goes. There against the eavesdrop of night, clear as a refrain, they were young, running after mercy. It's taillights long gone. I love it. There against the eavesdrop of night, as I've said, that immediately. immediately unsettles us. Already we're in an environment where we don't feel relaxed, where we can't trust anyone. There is eavesdropping. So against the eavesdropping of night, clear as a refrain. Now, a refrain can be in a poem, often in a song, and it's often a repeated section. You get it

in old ballads a lot. So this is clear as a refrain, they were young running after mercy. So why clear as a refrain? Because these young people running after mercy, this is obviously not a thing. It's not a one-off situation. So it's clear as a refrain because it's happening again. Here comes the refrain again. That's what I think is going on. I also think because refrains are often associated with ballads, it's sort of suggesting a sort of folk truth, something that is very set deep in a certain community. It's this thing, young people running after mercy, something they've seen before, that old refrain, that deep truth that you can find even in this document. I'll start off again. They're against the eavesdrop of night, clear as a refrain.

They were young, running after mercy, its taillights long gone. So it's taillights being, you know, the lights on the back of the car. So they're running after mercy. They're looking for some sort of compassion, some sort of mercy from the authorities that are pursuing them. But they're not so much running away. it's not so much about fear. It's running towards Mercy,

reaching out for some sort of hope, for some sort of humanity. And I think running after Mercy, it's taillights long gone. The idea that Mercy as was there may be, but it's driven away, that's a horrible but brilliant image. I'm going to go on to the next bit.

I'm not doing the whole extract, but I just want to give you an idea of what Nicole Celius found incredibly in this very formal document. Okay, this one's a bit longer. You'll hear me turning the pages because I think part of the process in this is you do have to keep going and going to get to the end of the poetic idea. And I like all these pages of jargon and official document going past why you're going. you're there with the poetry. The poetry is sort of running underneath it.

Consider the severity flight imposes on a deer. Instances in which the animal, out of nowhere, appears to flee two or three seconds too late, but does so only because of a design oversight, assigned to this particular brand of beast, we are the same fleeing things. Okay, so in the midst of the document, I want to keep saying that, because when you look at the document,

it's so official. It's like those big fat, you know, those white papers that you see politicians sometimes have in front of them in the House of Commons and you think, wow, somebody actually read through that. And a deer, there's lots of animals in Nicole Seeley's erasure poetry taken from the Ferguson report.

Nature, she's finding nature in all this. And the deer, this deer who's sort of programmed to flee in order to save itself, but the timer's not quite right. it leaves just a few seconds. Consider the severity, flight imposes on a deer. I think the stress of flight, the sort of physical strain of that sudden explosion of flight, of running away.

And I'm sure we're meant to think back to those fleeing youths desperately running towards a mercy that is long gone. consider the severity flight imposes on a deer instances in which the animal out of nowhere appears to flee and we've all seen these on David Attenborough things and all that they just hear a little noise something changes and suddenly they're in terrified flight two or three seconds too late

and that's the tragedy of the deer There's something that doesn't quite get them out of there on time. This is how Nicole Sealy Fusey. So out of nowhere appears to flee two or three seconds too late, but does so only because of a design oversight assigned to this particular brand of beast. So it's a design fault, if you like. and the deer can never quite move fast enough. And this last sentence, which she's taken,

the we is W from was and the E from necessary, you know, it's picked out, but it's so, I think, stunning. We are the same fleeing things. And it's just about, I think, fear and weakness and we can mean that community of Ferguson, Missouri, or it could mean just all of us. We're all sort of frightened and apt to run away, be it physically or mentally,

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So I really would recommend you read the whole thing and you need to see it. I'm trying to communicate what it's like. but imagine a page which is prose. If you see prose as the great antithesis of poetry, prose, dull prose, which has been made grey, which is what it seems to deserve, and then it's been crossed out. And here and there are these black letters,

these black words, these black phrases, sparking out at you, like poetry looking through a, caught Collis and saying, I'm in here if you can find me. So that is a rase your poem, and that was Nicole Seeley. Someone sent me a book called The Savage Language by Emma Filthness. Not a poet I'd ever heard of, I'll be brutally honest. And I read from the book that Dr. Emma Filthness is a senior lecturer in creative writing at Brunel University of London. And what Emma Fultness has done,

she has taken the book, I know much loved probably by many of you, Wuthering Heights. Now what she hasn't done with Wuthering Heights is she hasn't erased it. She has lifted it. And a lifted poem is a slightly different. beast, picking upon the beast imagery. In fact, in the collection, the Nicole Seeley collection, after she's gone through the report, she gives you lifted poems, which are, they are sort of slightly truncated versions of what we find in the prose, but she puts them, so suddenly they have lines and they have enjambment and punctuation and all the things you expect line breaks in a poem, I like them less than the ones that we get that are left in the body of the text.

I like them less, I think, because there's less of a feeling of sort of covert rebellion. You know, there's less the idea of sort of smuggling divisive poetry into the official prose of power. With Emily Filteness, you don't get both versions. you don't get a page of Wothering Heights and the words that she's picked out. You just get the words. I miss, I would like to have seen them in situ, I think. But even so, they work beautifully.

And they have a slight sort of haiku feeling. I think if you lift poems like this out of a text, you tend to leave bigger gaps, if you know what I mean. bigger gaps of meaning than you might normally get in a poem. I'm going to read one. Now, everyone has a number, and the number of the poem is actually the page number that the poem has risen from, if you like. All taken from the vintage classics 2008 edition of Wuthering Heights,

if you want to go back and see the words in their original place. Okay, so the first one I'm going to read is from Pover, page 260. Some of the poems, I'd say at the beginning of Emma Feltness is this savage language, the first few poems that she has found in Wutheran Heights are about the environment. And then after that, we get more into, well, the ones I'm going to read, the main character of Kathy. So here it is, this is something that Emma Filthness, Dr. Emma.

filthness has lifted from page 260 of Wuthering Heights. I'll try and let you feel the line breaks if I can. In summer, the Moores dream, singing sky, rustling tree, and then a line which is all hyphenated. Lark, thrustle, blackbird, linic cuckoo. Dosky dells, swells of grass, wild drunk. You get that kind of haiku feeling. You sense that there's things between that the poet has decided we don't need, we don't need them.

There's something exciting about them not being there. There's something exciting about us feeling what would have been there. if you like. So in summer the Moors dream. That's a great star, isn't it? The idea of the Moors actually dreaming. Singing sky rustling tree. You just get a sense of how it is. Maybe this is what the dream is like. Singing sky rustling tree. And then this line, lark, throstle, blackbird, linic, cuckoo. It feels like a sort of harmony. All these bird voices. all made into one hyphenated line. So we're not allowed to separate the birds.

We're getting them as a sort of a, what Phil Spector called a wall of sound. Probably not that cool to quote Phil Spector's work nowadays. But anyway, like Throsse or Blackbird Lynette Cuckoo, they seem to constitute that singing sky and inhabit that rustling tree. And I love this next line is sort of two lines, but on one line. Two phrases on one line, but with a gap in the middle.

So dusky dells gap swells of grass. And what I like, even though this has been taken from prose, it's got those internal rhymes. Dusky dell swells of grass, that dells and swells. thing that you'd expect from a sort of normally originally constructed poem. So just an idea of what there is, Dusky Dell swells of grass, just some things that are on the moors. And then finally one last line, again hyphenated, wild drunk. Now, what I look about wild drunk, I mean, that is a phrase that you hear, obviously,

people get wild drunk. Does it mean that the wild, the moors are slightly drunk, that this, the reason they dream in summer is some sort of narcotic haze that the moors finds itself in? Is the speaker wild drunk, is all the imagery, the environment, everything they see and hear, is it making them sort of drunk on wildness, if you like? Also, I think wild drunk is just the sense of unfettered nature, nature that hasn't been neatly trimmed and put in order. It reminds me a bit. I did another poetry podcast, some of you may have heard, about the ancient Greek poet Sappho.

And all we've got left of Sappho really is fragments. and it's those fragments you you read them but you find some sort of continuity and you find meaning and you're able to you know in films when you see people jump from one building to the next or from one railway carries to the next that's kind of a bit how these poems work you are making leaps of meaning okay i'm going to give you another another one about the environment. I'm moving a bit faster than I normally do because as I'm saying, it's the genre,

it's the idea, it's taking a page of Wuthering Heights in this example and looking at it and finding poetry in it. Now you might say there's already poetry in Wuthering Heights. Okay, but this is finding new poetry. It's finding the stowa way. Obviously, this differs considerably from what Nicole Seeley was doing

because she's taking the most unpoetic thing you could find, and she is finding poetry in that, whereas Emma Filteness is taking an already extant work of art and finding another work of art in it. So it's a slightly different thing. And as I say again, she isn't giving you the environment, the surroundings, the word she's not using, She's just given you the words that she has lifted from the original.

Lifted sounds like stolen. I don't mean that. I suppose. No, I don't mean that. They are called lifted poems when they're presented like this without their background text. Okay, here's another one about the environment. In a glitter of copper light, immense and towering a vast oak, its entire anatomy laid bare. So in a glitter of copper light, you sort of imagining maybe towards the end of day,

but also the size of the oak, its branches, its leafage, as given its own light, it's sort of filtered the natural light and given its own a glitter of copper light. immense and towering this massive mighty a vast oak and you get all those words lining up immense towering vast we get in it it's massive it's it's awe-inspiring and then you get its entire anatomy laid bare so entire anatomy again gives the hint of size but there's a tweet this line is a turning point i would say its entire anatomy laid bare. Laid bare is a sort of vulnerability almost. It's like we're going to find out something that maybe the oak didn't want us to know.

And that word entire makes it sound large, but also makes it sound that we're going to get the whole story this time. So I'm going to give you the second bit. Remember the first bit, In a glitter of copper light, immense and towering of vast oak, its entire anatomy laid bare. Clusters. Primitive, black, lurking. Haunted recesses frothing after dark.

Ho! I mean, this tree, it was all about power and grandeur and stature, and that line, its entire anatomy laid bare, when you do lay it bare, and anatomy suggests some sort of internal delving into that surface grandeur. You just get clusters. We don't know what of, but it sounds ominous. Clusters. Primitive, black, lurking, haunted recesses, frothing, and then the last line, after dark. Now, frothing after dark, I just think is a scary, scary image. But after dark suggests that when we saw the oak and looked at it in a glitter of copper light, we saw its power and its majesty.

But when it gets dark, then you see clusters, primitive black lurking, haunted recesses, frothing after dark. It's a different story by night. That moves me on to one of the poems about Cathy. Catherine Linton, I think is a full name, but I think of her as Kathy largely due to Kate Bush's interpretation of Arthurine Heights. Okay. This is from page five.

Her sudden fury was an absolute tempest, an inhabitant of lost, fire flushed, flourishing, the storm magic and heaving, like a sea after a high wind the devil possessed. Right, her sudden fury was an absolute tempest. So, I mean, that's pretty clear. This woman, something exploded in her. An inhabitant of lost. Is she the inhabitant?

or is her fury an inhabitant of lost? Does it dwell in lost? Is that where it comes from? Some dark place, maybe a suggestion that it's external to her, possibly in some way. Her sudden fury was an absolute tempest, an inhabitant of lost.

Okay, this next line, fire flushed, flourishing. and it does that thing that we talked about on the earlier poem, I'm flicking back through the pages, when it was Duskydale's Gap, Swells of Grass. Here it's fire-flushed gap flourishing. I think that's another turning point line. It seems to be a description of her fire-flushed,

and I just think that means she's sort of red in the face after this sudden fury. But also fire-flushed sounds hellish if you like sounds that it might have come from a darker place from hell in some way and we get obviously those repeated sounds that alliteration

of fire flushed flourishing which were beautifully I think they remind me a bit of Gerard Manley Hopkins poems I've also done a poetry podcast about Gerard Manley Hopkins if you're interested but fire flushed flourishing. And what's interesting about it is fire flush seems to be the red face of this post tempest of fury woman. But flourishing seems to suggest that we see something beautiful and exciting and real and raw in her.

It goes on the storm, magic and heaving. So the storm magic again suggests that it's not all negative, is it, this absolute tempest, this sudden fury? It's like she's been transformed, turned into something more magical, more powerful. The storm, magic and heaving. And heaving, it obviously suggests, I mean, it's that sort of repeated upward down rhythm, rising and falling. heaving, not about to throw up. It suggests a sort of heavy breathing. It's obviously it sounds a bit sexual as well. The storm magic and heaving. She's lying there almost, dare I say, post-coital after this absolute tempest. And I like this last simile like a sea after a high wind,

the devil possessed. So now she's like the sea after a tempest, a high wind has whipped it up. So it's as if this fury, this absolute tempest, has come from somewhere else, from the devil, from some sort of dark magic. It feels like she's been possessed by this tempest of lost, something that the speaker sees as maybe external to this woman. It may be, of course, at this stage that you Wuthering Heights fans are all screaming. It's Heathcliff, you idiot, but I'm sticking to what's in this new work of art, this new poem, and not making any guesses at its original context. Also, I'll be straight with you. I haven't actually read Wuthering Heights too many words, and so I don't know when Heathcliff turns up.

Anyway, so she's like a sea after a high wind the devil possessed. And the sea often after a storm is heaving. It does have a new, roarer, wilder beauty to it. I think I'm going to stop there. You get the gist of this and you get how beautifully it works. And you might think that finding something beautiful in Wuthering Heights is a bit easier than finding something beautiful in a government report. But I don't think we need to make that comparison.

They both work brilliantly. If you're interested in Eurasia poetry and found poetry as a result of this, I would recommend, and I don't know if I've ever recommended a app on here before, but there is an app called a blackout bard and blackout bard allows you to become the Nicol Seeley allows you to become the Emma Feltness it gives you a selection of prose passages from quite well-known things and then you can just click on the words you want to keep and you can create your own erasure poetry, your own, well, it is erasure poetry because you get the discarded text lying there behind it as a fabulous sort of juxtaposition, a fabulous sort of backdrop. So I'm going to, look,

I never, ever, ever would normally do this, but I'm going to, I've done one just to see and to show you how it works. They have an extract from Haruki Murakami. And he says, I'll tell you what it says before you do anything to it, he says, I often recall these words when I am writing and I think to myself, it's true. There aren't any new words. Our job is to give new meanings and special overtones to absolutely ordinary words. I find the thought reassuring. It means that vast unknown stretches still lie before us.

fertile territories, just waiting for us to cultivate them. So you can then click on the words you want to keep and see if you can make a sort of poem out of it. This is my attempt. I am not setting this up as fine poetry. I'm setting it up as how the app works. So what I have removed, what I have taken from Murakami's prose passage is this,

When I am writing, it's special. The thought, that vast unknown, just waiting. Now, you see, it's quite fun to do. And I think, I don't know how much fun Nicole Seeley had going through some of the horrors of the Ferguson report. I think that was a difficult kind of thing. for Emma Feltness, I presume that she loves Wuthering Heights, and it must be exciting to find, you know, finding something new in something you love,

like finding something new in someone you love. My friend's work of art, great, but this is just a feeling for it. If you would love to write poetry, but you just, you know, you just can't do it, I think this is a really interesting thing of looking at prose and seeing what you can find hiding away. Don't you just love the idea?

I don't want to slag off prose, you know, but let's face it. It's not poetry, is he? And I like the idea of slightly overstating it, turning base metal into gold, turning prose into poetry. Give it a go. And also look out for Nicole Seeley's The Ferguson Report and a row. for the Savage Language by Emma Filpness. And, well, see what you think.

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