Celebrate World Oceans Day with an erasure poem!
Monday 8 June is UN World Oceans Day and this year's theme is reimagine. In INVISEA, one of the methods we use for engaging with the seabed is erasure poetry. What better way to reimagine the ocean and celebrating World Oceans Day than to make an erasure poem with us?
By: Rachel Douglas-Jones, Marit Ruge Bjærke and Hugo Reinert
Published:
The INVISEA project will be engaging with stakeholders through a range of workshops in 2027, exploring values and understandings of seabed areas. For World Oceans Day 2026, we invite you to try out one of our methods yourself – making an erasure poem.
Erasure poetry is defined by The Poetry Foundation as “a poetic form in which a poet blacks out or in some way erases words from a preexisting source to create new poems”. We are using erasure poetry in our project as we are bringing the humanities into conversation with the seabed itself, as well as with the knowledge production and policy processes surrounding it.
The worksheet (external link) contains instructions and inspiration questions from the World Oceans Day materials.
If you make a poem, we'd love to receive it! You can upload it on this site (external link) and we'll feature our favourites here!