[A]rt is not something that should be done well. If doing it well is what counts, it’s craft, production for sale, and therefore subject to the taste of the buyer, who will naturally want something good. But art creates it’s own paradigm. It isn’t “good” according to preexisting standards; rather, it sets the standard for what is to come (the crafts of the future). That’s the difference between creation and production.
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate 2014-2019, has published 20 collections of poems and edited or co-edited three poetry anthologies. He currently directs two master’s-level programs for University College at the University of Denver: Professional Creative Writing and Arts & Culture Management. Joe lives with his wife, Melody Madonna, in the mountains southwest of Denver, Colorado, the city where he was born. 
I think erasure simply taps into the game aspect of verse. It’s not much different from writing a villanelle or a pantoum or a lipogram. (I stumbled across the latter in a Wikipedia article on the 1939 novel GADSBY, by Ernest Vincent Wright, written without words containing the letter “e.” See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)) So “new” may not be the issue. Poetry, like any written art form, is subject to fads. I do agree that not everything that comes after truly original works are mere craft. One artist, one poet, who makes a creative breakthrough can’t possibly exhaust all the possibilities the breakthrough opens up. Isn’t the same true of scientific breakthroughs? Copernicus displaces Ptolemy; Einstein expands on Newtonian theory. Seems the way of the human world.
Excellent. But this definition seems limiting to me. Certainly art doesn’t have to set a standard and not everything that comes after is merely craft. The original isn’t in the form but in the way the poet (in our case) sees/feels/forms the poem. The Aira quote also brings to mind the many writers who so desperately want to be “new” or to be or on the cusp of something new (usually something that was introduced decades before that they were ignorant of). I’m thinking now of the erasure craze of the last several years. Maybe Tracy K. Smith and Mary Ruefle revitalized erasure poetry from the sixties. No idea. But I know several poets who experiment with or copy the concept, They want to be “contemporary” or don’t know how to write about or confront their subject. I’ve only read one poem using erasure technique that I thought original (can’t recall the poet). The poet used Frost’s “Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening” The result was startling, but she could have simply taken the words she liked and made her poem without the blank or whited out areas. Frost’s poem was the inspiration, but the words were common enough.