erasure

Erasure Poetry: A revealing (ii)

Refracting documents

[image: "Zong! #3," M. NourbeSe Philip] — "Zong! #3," M. NourbeSe Philip

In my previous post, I wanted to address the inherent political implications of how erasure poetry refracts a document into another one. I also asked: How do some poets use the rupturing of a text in order to reclaim, redress, resist? How does the intentional absenting of language attempt to succeed where its presence cannot? With this in mind, Zong! by M.

Erasure poetry: A revealing (i)

Jennifer S. Cheng

Erasure as an artistic form carries with it an urgent complexity of politics and ethics. Perhaps it is always inherently a political act. Perhaps it is always inherently a violent act, the removal of language as either defacing or disremembering. If erasure is a historical tool of the oppressor, can it ever be artistically innocent? We struggle with the complexities. The nuances change depending on the nature of the text being erased (government documents, nursery rhymes, Mein Kampf, the Holy Bible, speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., etc.) and on the person or entity doing the erasing. What power relations are implicated in such an act? What historical significance? Who gets to enact erasure, if anyone, and how does its impact or meaning change depending on who is implementing it?

In my investigations into how a poetics and politics of refraction sheds light on certain works by artists from the margins, it seems natural that, as a poet, I would eventually consider works of erasure. In light of my discussion of refraction, rupture, and ruins:

Defaced/refaced books

The erasure practices of Jen Bervin and Mary Ruefle

Mary Hickman

At the 2013 Associated Writers and Writing Programs Conference in Boston, I wandered among rows of bright, strange, and intriguing books piled high on independent poetry press tables. Hand-stamped, letter-pressed, spray-painted, ripped, sewn, and covered in tinfoil; poems shaped like boxes, poems printed on records, poems made into pop-ups or puzzles, or rolled as cigarettes — I even spotted a tiny book hidden inside a plastic egg.

September 18, 2014

The POD people

Writing through, erasure, appropriation, mimicry

Amaranth Borsuk

Mimi Cabell and Jason Huff, American Psycho (2012). image: Mimi Cabell

So what might a conceptual, print-on-demand artist's book look like?

Several contemporary writers are using the form of pre-existing books as a container for innovative publishing experiments that they can make available at a reasonable price thanks to POD and affordable printing options. Like the pod people in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, these new books resemble their sources externally, but diverge dramatically in content, which involves erasure and writing-through. They are also facilitated by the availability of digital editions of these books which provide a searchable, scrapable, alterable source.

The following are not all print-on-demand publications, but they take on trade paperback form in ways that intrigue me:

Recently in Jacket2

Every flower a reminder (PoemTalk #202)

Harryette Mullen, "Chasing Dirt"

PoemTalk

From left: Laynie Browne, Harryette Mullen, Simone White

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Simone White, Harryette Mullen, and Laynie Browne joined Al Filreis to talk a six-page section of Harryette’s new book Open Leaves. The book, subtitled “poems from earth,” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press of London in 2023. The section discussed by the group is titled “Chasing Dirt” and consists of two epigraphs, a prose-poem paragraph, a mixed media artwork titled Silent Talks by Tiffanie Delune, and a sequence of three-line poems across four pages of four poems each. Since PennSound’s Harryette Mullen author page did not yet include a recording of Harryette performing poems from Open Leaves, we asked her to read “Chasing Dirt” at the start of the recorded session. The pages from Open Leaves are available HERE.

November 20, 2024

The &vs. (andverse) of the Gurlesque

Becca Klaver

Electric Gurlesque, like the first edition of the anthology, is centered on an idea of the Gurlesque as a feminist aesthetic that emerges most prominently in American women’s poetry at the turn of the 21st century. The braided strands of the Gurlesque — which the subtitle of the first edition identified as “grrly,” “grotesque,” and “burlesque”— come together to form one complex aesthetic strategy, and also suggest the diverse avenues of inquiry pursued by the essayists in this section.

The following is the Preface to the Essays from the new anthology Electric Gurlesque published by Saturnalia Books in 2024. The complete anthology can be found here.

November 19, 2024

Anna de Noailles, translated by Chris Mustazza

Charles Bernstein

Anna de Noailles (1876-1933) was one of the most famous French poets of her day. While her work has mostly fallen out of fashion, I’ve opted to translate this poem because it was one of (if not the) first poems ever recorded to sound by a female poet. Her recording at the Sorbonne, made in the early 1920s, causes this ars poetica to realign itself with the performance of the poem rather than the written text. It speaks to pertinent questions of posthumous reception and the archive, through a light, playful, sexual mode: the nachlass as seduction. --Chris Mustazza