A piece of blackout poetry, created by blocking out words from newsprint
Erasure poetry, or blackout poetry, is a form of found poetry or found object art created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem.[1] The results can be allowed to stand in situ or they can be arranged into lines and/or stanzas.
Writers and visual artists have adopted this form both to achieve a range of cognitive or symbolic effects and to focus on the social or political meanings of erasure. Erasure is a way to give an existing piece of writing a new set of meanings, questions, or suggestions. It lessens the trace of authorship but also draws attention to the original text.
History
Doris Cross appears to have been among the earliest to utilize this technique, beginning in 1965 with her "Dictionary Columns" book art.[2] Other examples before 1980 include:
Mans Wows – Jesse Glass' Mans Wows (1981), is a series of poems and performance pieces mined from John George Hohman's book of charms and healings Pow Wows, or The Long Lost Friend.
The poetic form gained new political purpose online in 2017 in response to the Trump administration.[4]
The tradition of concrete poetry and the works of visual artists such as d.a. levy have some relationship to this artform.
Use in representations of political or social themes
Government and military secrecy
Holzer's Xenon projected onto a building in Bregenz, Austria
Jenny Holzer's Redaction Paintings consists of enlarged, colorized silkscreen "paintings" of declassified and often heavily censored American military and intelligence documents that have recently been made available to the public through the Freedom of Information Act. The works are intended as reminders of the editing or erasure that goes on behind the scenes in the American military/political power system. Documents address counter-terrorism, prisoner abuse, and the threat of Osama bin Laden. Some of the documents are almost completely inked out, like Colin Powell's memo on Defense Intelligence Agency reorganization.[5]
Anthropologist Michael Powell writes: "While the literal act of redaction attempts to extract information and eradicate meaning, the black marker actually transforms the way we read these documents, sparking curiosity and often stirring skeptical, critical, and even cynical readings. As redacted government documents make their way from government bureaus into the hands of citizens, a peculiar transformation seems to take place, one that seems to create a paranoia within reason."[6]
Seven Testimonies (redacted) – Nick Flynn's "Seven Testimonies (redacted)" in The Captain Asks a Show of Hands, is an erasure of the testimonies from prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Holocaust
Jonathan Safran Foer's 2010 Tree of Codes is a book-length erasure of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. Schulz was killed by an officer of the Gestapo during the Nazi occupation of his hometown Drohobycz, after distributing the bulk of his life's work to gentile friends immediately prior to the occupation. All of these manuscripts have been lost. The Tree of Codes is Safran-Foer's attempt to represent the unrepresentable loss which occurred in the Holocaust by deleting text, rather than by writing another book about the Holocaust as a historical subject or context for a work of fiction.[7] Safran-Foer's approach to the Holocaust as an "unrepresentable subject" recalls the use of negative space in the poetry of Dan Pagis.[8][9]
Freedom and Slavery
Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith has written several erasure poems, including "Declaration" (drawn from the Declaration of Independence) and "The Greatest Personal Privation" (from letters about slaveholding).[10]
Poets such as Jordan Abel and Billy-Ray Belcourt have engaged in erasure poetry to mirror the erasure of Indigenous peoples from history.[14] Through working to erase existing texts such as Treaty 8[15] in "NDN Coping Mechanisms" by Billy-Ray Belcourt and "Totem Poles" by Canadian ethnographer Marius Barbeau in "The Place of Scraps" by Jordan Abel these two poets "make and unmake texts"[15] the way Indigenous histories have been made and unmade by colonialist influences.[14]
A Little White Shadow – Mary Ruefle's A Little White Shadow is a book-length erasure (done by painting over select words of a 19th-century book).
ALL KINDS OF FUR (2018) by Margaret Yocom erases her translation of "All Kinds Of Fur", a tale from the Brothers Grimm (a version of Cinderella that opens with incest), to reveal how the heroine, All Kinds Of Fur, would tell her own story.
Be Brave: An Unlikely Manual for Erasing Heartbreak by J. M. Farkas is a book-length erasure of Beowulf.
Mans Wows – Jesse Glass' Mans Wows (1981), is a series of poems and performance pieces mined from John George Hohman's book of charms and healings Pow Wows, or The Long Lost Friend.
Darkness erases Joseph Conrad's novella, "whiting out" his text so that only images of the natural world remain, by Poet Yedda Morrison, Published 2012.
Hope Tree – Frank Montesonti's Hope Tree is a book of erasure poems based on R. Sanford Martin's How to Prune Fruit Trees.
Little – Emily Anderson's Little: Novels erases each of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie novels to present an alternative imagining of US frontier history.
Nets – Jen Bervin's Nets is an erasure of Shakespeare's sonnets.[16]
Of Lamb – Matthea Harvey's Of Lamb is a book-length erasure of a biography of Charles Lamb.
Psaumes - Un sépulcre et toujours un nom, published by Les Gens du blâme Éditions - A Psaumes Book effacement (2018)
R E D – Chase Berggrun's R E D is a book-length erasure of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
"Regression," a short story in Tell Me What You See (2022) by Terena Elizabeth Bell, uses erasure to show the progression of Alzheimer's disease from the patient perspective.[17]
Sacrilegious: Poems & Prose (Fahmidan Publishing & Co., 2021) is a chapbook by poet Chris L. Butler that contains erasures of various songs from the rapper Tupac Shakur in memory of the 25th anniversary of his death.
"Sand Opera"-Philip Metres's book on the War on Terror includes erasures of Abu Ghraib prisoner testimonies, the Standard Operation Procedure manual for the Guantanamo Bay prison, and other sources.
The ms of my kin (2009) erased the poems of Emily Dickinson written in 1861–62, the first few years of the Civil War, to discuss the contemporary Iraq War by Janet Holmes
The O Mission Repo – Travis Macdonald's The O Mission Repo treats each chapter of The 9/11 Commission Report with a different method of poetic erasure.
The Place of Scraps (2013) is a book of erasure poetry by Nisga'a writer Jordan Abel.
1 2 Karpinski, Max (Autumn 2016). "'Split With the Kind Knife': Salvage Ethnography and Poetics of Appropriation in Jordan Abel's The Place of Scraps". Vancouver (230/231): 65–84. ProQuest1950055800.
Constrained writing is a literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern.
Callimachus was an ancient Greek poet, scholar, and librarian who was active in Alexandria during the 3rd century BC. A representative of Ancient Greek literature of the Hellenistic period, he wrote over 800 literary works, most of which do not survive, in a wide variety of genres. He espoused an aesthetic philosophy, known as Callimacheanism, which exerted a strong influence on the poets of the Roman Empire and, through them, on all subsequent Western literature.
The sentence "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose" was written by Gertrude Stein as part of the 1913 poem "Sacred Emily", which appeared in the 1922 book Geography and Plays. In that poem, the first "Rose" is the name of a person. Stein later used variations on the sentence in other writings, and the shortened form "A rose is a rose is a rose" is among her most famous quotations, often interpreted as meaning "things are what they are", a statement of the law of identity, "A is A."
Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words, phrases, and sometimes whole passages from other sources and reframing them by making changes in spacing and lines, or by adding or deleting text, thus imparting new meaning. The resulting poem can be defined as treated: changed in a profound and systematic manner; or untreated: virtually unchanged from the order, syntax and meaning of the poem.
Naomi Shihab Nye is an Arab American poet, editor, songwriter, and novelist. Born to a Palestinian father and an American mother, she began composing her first poetry at the age of six. In total, she has published or contributed to over 30 volumes of poetry. Her works include poetry, young-adult fiction, picture books, and novels. Nye received the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children's Literature in honor of her entire body of work as a writer, and in 2019 the Poetry Foundation designated her the Young People's Poet Laureate for the 2019–21 term.
Redaction or sanitization is the process of removing sensitive information from a document so that it may be distributed to a broader audience. It is intended to allow the selective disclosure of information. Typically, the result is a document that is suitable for publication or for dissemination to others rather than the intended audience of the original document.
Dan Pagis was an Israeli poet, lecturer and Holocaust survivor.
Jon Howie Stallworthy, was a British literary critic and poet. He was Professor of English at the University of Oxford from 1992 to 2000, and Professor Emeritus in retirement. He was also a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1986, where he was twice acting president. From 1977 to 1986, he was the John Wendell Anderson Professor of English at Cornell University.
Coleman Barks is an American poet and former literature faculty member at the University of Georgia. Although he neither speaks nor reads Persian, he is a popular interpreter of Rumi, rewriting the poems based on other English translations.
Barrett Watten is an American poet, editor, and educator associated with the Language poets. He is a professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan where he teaches modernism and cultural studies.
Mary Ruefle is an American poet, essayist, and professor. She has published many collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Dunce, was longlisted for the National Book Award in Poetry and a finalist for the 2020 Pulitzer Prize. Ruefle's debut collection of prose, The Most Of It, appeared in 2008 and her collected lectures, Madness, Rack, and Honey, in 2012, both published by Wave Books. She has also published a book of erasures, A Little White Shadow (2006).
Experimental literature is a genre of literature that is generally "difficult to define with any sort of precision." It experiments with the conventions of literature, including boundaries of genres and styles; for example, it can be written in the form of prose narratives or poetry, but the text may be set on the page in differing configurations than that of normal prose paragraphs or in the classical stanza form of verse. It may also incorporate art or photography. Furthermore, while experimental literature was traditionally handwritten, the digital age has seen an exponential use of writing experimental works with word processors.
Ronald Johnson was a poet from Ashland, Kansas, whose significant works include a number of experimental long poems such as The Book of the Green Man, RADI OS, and his magnum opus ARK. Johnson graduated from Columbia University in 1960, wandered in Appalachia and Britain for a number of years, then settled in San Francisco for twenty-five years before returning to Kansas, where he died. Writer and critic Guy Davenport once referred to Johnson as America's greatest living poet, while poet Robert Creeley considered Johnson as "one of the defining peers of [his] own imagined company of poets."
The Wangchuan ji is a collection of Tang poetry written by the two poets Wang Wei and Pei Di, also known by other names, such as the Wheel River Collection. Wang Wei had acquired a retirement location away from the busy capitol city, in what is now Lantian County, in China. The verses are based on a series of twenty scenes, inspired in part by the sights available at Wang Wei's retirement estate and in part by imaginary allusion: each one forms the topic for a pair of one five-character quatrains, one by each of the poetic pair. Besides the long-term interest in these verses in China, this anthology has created much interest around the world, including numerous translations, especially Wang's version of what has been translated as "Deer Park", among other versions of the title. Several complete translations of the whole work have been done, in English. A series of "Twenty Scenes" of Wangchuan were done as a painting series. The Wangchuan poems form an important part of traditional Chinese Shan shui landscape painting and Shanshui poetry development. There are clear indications of the influence of the Six Dynasties poet early exemplar of landscape genre poetry Xie Lingyun's poems on topics, partly inspired by his family estate, in what is today Zhejiang. The considerable influence of Pei Di and Wang Wei's Wangchuan ji shows in much subsequent painting, music, and poetry.
Conceptual writing is a style of writing which relies on processes and experiments. This can include texts which may be reduced to a set of procedures, a generative instruction or constraint, or a "concept" which precedes and is considered more important than the resulting text(s). As a category, it is closely related to conceptual art.
Amaranth Borsuk is an American poet and educator known for her experiments with textual materiality and digital poetry. She is currently an associate professor at the University of Washington Bothell's School of Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences, where she teaches undergraduate courses on poetry, philology, and experimental writing. She also serves as the Chair of the school's M.F.A. program in Creative Writing, which she co-chaired from 2018 to 2022.
Jordan Abel is an academic and poet who lives and works in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. He is an associate professor in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta.
Evie Shockley is an American poet. Shockley received the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry for her book the new black and the 2012 Holmes National Poetry Prize. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2018.
Billy-Ray Belcourt is a poet, scholar, and author from the Driftpile Cree Nation.
Nicole Sealey is an American poet who was born in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, and raised in Apopka, Florida, US. She is the former executive director of Cave Canem Foundation. She won the 2015 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize for The Animal After Whom Other Animals Are Named, and her collection Ordinary Beast was a finalist for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award. Her poem "Pages 22–29, an excerpt from The Ferguson Report: An Erasure" won a Forward Prize for Poetry in October 2021. Sealey lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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