“Nothing is Left Out”: Kenneth Goldsmith’s Sports and Erasure Poetry

The theoretical understanding of the tradition and purposes of erasure poetry in the avant-garde tradition has been elucidated by such critics as Travis MacDonald and Brian McHale. These definitions, however, tend to homogenize all forms of erasure poetries into a single radical gesture. A closer examination of such texts beginning with their antecedents in the visual arts reveals a number of disparate techniques resulting in erasure and a wide variety of political and aesthetic results. Thus there are “modernist,” conservative erasure works such as Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os and “postmodern,” destabilizing works such as Mary Ruefle’s Little White Shadow. By my close reading of the category, Kenneth Goldsmith’s book-length work Sports may be recognized as an erasure work, for his “uncreative” transcripts, which, he claims, “leave nothing out,” are actually radical erasures that fulfill a political purpose.