Un/published: Presence and Absence in Contemporary Erasure Poetry

Abstract

Erasure poetry is a form of appropriative poetry that has experienced a veritable boom in the last two decades. Poets are using erasure as a creative strategy to produce new work; teachers are employing it as an educational game; companies, from newspapers to law firms, are utilizing it for marketing purposes; and activists are turning it into a form of protest.¹ Erasures turn redaction, a means originally reserved for the censorship of documents, into an aesthetic strategy for reworking found text. The author takes a published text and crosses out, paints over, or cuts out parts of it, transforming it into a sequence of words and gaps that make up the new poem. As is typical for literary appropriations, erasures signify by reframing already circulating material. What sets the technique apart from other kinds of appropriation is that the repurposing of the found material occurs through acts of obliteration and that the deletions and subsequent new configurations of the retained text fragments significantly transform the appropriated material. This renders the relations between source text and erasure poem always charged and explains why the form, although principally open to the pursuit of all kinds of thematic and formal concerns, currently is often used to address social justice issues. By creating new work through the partial effacement of prior texts, erasure poetry literally puts processes of obliteration on display and provides a structural analogy for both: the social erasure of marginalized groups and cultures by hegemonic discourses and politics and the criticism and rewriting of these discourses to redress unjust practices and conditions.

In this essay, I argue that the critical potential of erasure poetry results from the form’s play with what is present on and absent from the page and that we can better understand how the poems signify, engage their readers, and perform cultural work when we read the erasures against their published source texts—that is, when we pay attention to what the poems appropriate yet make disappear.² Erasures are built out of the remnants of their source texts, adapting their linguistic material (and often also their graphic layout). The prior texts remain present in the erasure poems not only in the shape of the retained fragments, however, but also in the form of elisions and gaps. The erasure marks add another layer of meaning to the preserved and reconfigured material, indicating that elements of the source texts were obscured or deleted.³ Although the effaced sections no longer function as carriers of semantic meaning, they constitute—in the form of blank spaces, redaction marks, painted over surfaces, or even holes—integral elements of the poems.⁴ As a result, erasure poems oscillate on the page between presence (of the retained words, the erasure marks, and the newly created composition) and absence (of the complete source text, some of its material and medial features, and many of its words). Erasures thus remain in flux, continually emerging as part of and against their disappearing yet also still present source texts. This essay examines the literary and sociocultural work that this oscillation between presence and absence performs in contemporary erasure poetry through analyses of erasures by Tracy Smith, Janet Holmes, and Jen Bervin. It shows that to read poems as erasures rather than as poems written by the poets from scratch means to comprehend the words on the page in relation to the elided passages. They form the background or matrix that defines the configuration of the preserved words and informs our understanding of their significance. Erasures are un/published texts that signify through the interplay of their expunged and retained sections.

1. Erasure, Appropriation, and the Documentary Turn

Erasures depend on and rewrite prior texts. Any type of literary or nonliterary text can serve as source material: some writers take their sharpies to newspapers and legal documents, others redact poems or novels. The recent boom in erasure poetry has been driven to a significant degree by politically motivated works that use various techniques of erasure to articulate cultural criticism and political dissent. These erasures often, but not exclusively, refashion nonliterary documents, revising what is perceived as their flawed language and problematic logic and politics. In The O Mission Repo (2008), for instance, Travis Macdonald erases The 9/11 Commission Report to “redress/its/lexicon” (xvi), aiming to reveal the error in the logic of the war on terror. In A Continuum of Force (2017), Francesco Levato effaces the official handbook on use of force by the US Customs and Border Protection agency to reveal how the text’s construction of Latin Americans as Other may encourage and serve to legitimize physical violence against migrants. Erasure poetry that revises government documents or political statements to vent, mock, and critique surged especially during the Trump presidency. In response to the wide range of cultural and social erasures that the Trump administration aimed to effect, poets circulated erasures of Trump speeches and government documents on the web and social media to protest, advocate for social justice, and build alliances. There was cathartic pleasure, the poet Noor Hindi noted in a tweet in January 2018, in editing Trump’s inflated language to expose the social costs of his policies: “I wrote an erasure poem of a Trump speech tonight. It was surprisingly therapeutic and fun to cross his stupid words out and make them tiny, like his hands. Poetry is what will keep me alive during this presidency.”⁵

Composing erasures of nonliterary public documents has become a popular mode of cultural criticism, protest, and advocacy. At the March for Science in Washington, DC, in April 2017, for instance, demonstrators could participate in poetry workshops, promoted by Jane Hirshfield and Poets for Science, and create erasures of scientific texts, which were later published online to fuel public debate.⁶ Recently, following the lead of M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! (2008), poets such as Harbani Ahuja and Clarence Williams have erased legal documents to explore the history of human and civil rights in the United States. In Dicta: Legal Poetry (2021), which was published on the website of the ABA Journal of the American Bar Association and as an interactive online exhibition by the human rights organization ICAAD, Ahuja redacts Supreme Court decisions that have significantly impacted the rights of Black people, immigrants, and women to educate her readers.⁷ In I am the Most Dangerous Thing (2023), Candace Williams erases the Supreme Court decision Whren vs. United States (1996) to denounce the document’s rhetoric of objectivity and to address the realities of racial profiling.⁸

These erasures are part of the “documental turn” in contemporary poetry (5) that Michael Leong describes in Contested Records (2020). Although appropriative practices have a long and varied poetic tradition in North American literature—including, for instance, the integration and reframing of documents by poets as diverse as Muriel Rukeyser, Charles Reznikoff, and William Carlos Williams, as well as the work with found material by Language poets like Lyn Hejinian and Charles Bernstein (5-7)—Leong’s study reveals how pervasive “documental poetics” have become in twenty-first–century poetry (6).⁹ Practices of citing, sampling, copying, recycling, recontextualizing, and rearranging found material inform different forms of poetry and communities of practice from conceptual to documentary poetry, Leong shows, and provide a link between poets who pursue very different poetic and political concerns, such as Kenneth Goldsmith, Mark Nowak, and Claudia Rankine.

Since erasures strive to rewrite and repurpose appropriated material by partially obliterating it, however, they typically aim to neither document factual information like some strands of investigative or documentary poetry nor reframe found material by copying and reproducing it in a new context, as does the kind of conceptual poetry that Kenneth Goldsmith has dubbed “uncreative” (4) and Marjorie Perloff “unoriginal” (12).¹⁰ Nonetheless, erasures can be considered “documental,” as Leong points out, because they “cite mostly publicly available texts in order to return them, rhetorically transformed, to the public sphere.” This objective of intervening in public discourse and collective memory has been “frequently overlooked in studies about appropriation” (3), which instead have seen appropriative poetics as indicative of a skeptical postmodern stance toward the figure of the author and associated concepts like originality or authenticity. Similarly, the fact that erasure poets efface not just any text but specifically published materials written by someone else has been taken for granted in most critical discussions. Yet it makes a tremendous difference for the cultural work that the erasures perform whether they rhetorically and materially rework published or unpublished material, as well as which degree of literary and sociocultural prestige or relevance the appropriated texts possess and to which discursive fields they belong.

Each appropriated text opens toward specific intertextual and sociocultural contexts. The source text and the erasure share words but not necessarily their discursive, material, and social networks. Although erasures are not conceptual readymades but significantly manipulate and alter the material they appropriate, Judith Goldman’s characterization of reframing as a conceptual practice still applies to them: it is “a dialogic, not to say antagonistic, affair, engaging the past medial incarnation of a text, as well as its pragmatic, interactive context, its world.” By choosing a specific text to work with, the poets not only decide on the vocabulary they will have at their disposal but also the type of text, genre, tradition, or discursive field they will engage with. This work of refashioning and transformation, of affiliation, participation, negation, criticism, or correction, takes place in an intertextual space, connecting erasure to other forms of literary appropriation that “stage[] priority,” as Sarah Dowling explains (119).¹¹ It “evokes the appropriated text’s origin and asks readers to meditate on the distance and the difference between that original context or appearance and its re-placement—to reflect on what changes when the appropriated material is recontextualized this way, within this poem” (119–20).

Erasure poems index this intertextual dimension—which is central to the aesthetic appeal and critical potential they possess as un/published texts—through erasure marks that denote the absence of the prior text and, yet, as a visible record of its obliteration, also keep the effaced text present in the poem. Depending on the techniques used to disappear the source material, literary erasures can contain different kinds of deletion marks. These can be blanks and the white space of the page when the text is visually expunged, as in Smith’s erasures in Wade in the Water (2018) of letters by white slaveholding families and African Americans who served in the Civil War. Or they can be literal holes when passages have been physically removed, as in Jonathan Safran Foer’s die-cut of the stories of Bruno Schulz in Tree of Codes (2010). Or they can be redaction marks when the text has been blacked out or painted over with white-out, as in Austin Kleon’s erasures of newspaper articles in Newspaper Blackout (2010) or Mary Rufele’s treatment of an etiquette novella in A Little White Shadow (2006). The same text can also combine different forms of erasure, leaving sections of the original wholly obscured and others crossed out but still legible in faded or blurry fonts, as in Macdonald’s The O Mission Repo or Philip Metres’s “abu ghraib arias” in Sand Opera (2015). Through their choice of intertext and redaction technique, each erasure negotiates the relation between source and new poem, original and refashioned version, presence and absence, published and unpublished, in different ways and to different effects, as my following analyses of erasures by Smith, Holmes, and Bervin will show.

2. Declaring the Obliterated

In the second section of Wade in the Water, Smith erases a number of historical documents that attest to the realities of slavery, racism, social injustice, and the African American struggle for human and civil rights. She selects both especially prominent and relatively unknown source texts, pairing an erasure of the Declaration of Independence with erasures of letters by white slaveholders and poems drawn from the correspondence and petitions of African American soldiers and their families regarding their service in the Civil War, which she excerpts from historical studies. By combining an erasure that reworks a foundational national document with poems that refashion and collate publicly accessible yet little known material that both documents racial bias and highlights previously marginalized Black perspectives, the section critiques, revises, and expands standard accounts of US history and national identity. Smith’s selection of sources that possess different viewpoints and degrees of sociocultural visibility and power is integral to the combined effect of the poems.

The Declaration of Independence is a particularly provocative and effective intertext for Smith to select for an erasure poem during her tenure as US Poet Laureate (2017–2019). Central to definitions of US national origin and identity that may trigger patriotic reflexes in some American readers, it may also be a document that they do not know very well beyond the famous lines, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” (Declaration of Independence). Many readers may not be aware that the greater part of the document consists of a list of grievances that the American colonists leveled at King George III to justify why they went to war and no longer considered themselves subject to British rule. It is this list of complaints, intended to justify the revolutionary cause, that Smith erases in “Declaration” to reveal the chasm between the nation’s democratic ideal and its history of slavery and systemic racism. She deletes most of the original text, keeping only select words and phrases, and inserts line breaks and rearranges the sequence in which some of the sentences occur. As erasure marks, she employs dashes and blanks.

The opening lines “He has / sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people” (17) sound surprisingly contemporary, turning a complaint raised by the colonists in 1776 into a comment on the present-day police violence and racial profiling that terrorize African American communities. That Smith has deleted the second part of the original sentence, which uses a more archaic vocabulary—“to harass our people, and eat out their substance”—makes the retained phrase sound more current and in conversation with the Black Lives Matter movement that informs the sociocultural context in which the poem was published and has been read. The poem signals that it is an erasure through its title; the italicization of the entire text, which is unusual enough to call attention to the mediated quality of the text; and the abundant white space between its widely spaced and irregularly aligned lines. The dashes and blank parts of the page mark the erased text of the Declaration, while the retained parts not only revise the document’s meaning but also reconfigure its speaker. Smith’s “Declaration” is articulated by a new collective “we”: the speakers are no longer the colonists fighting British rule but the Africans and African Americans whom they and their descendants enslaved and assaulted. By making Black people the speakers of “Declaration,” Smith’s poem refigures their historical dehumanization and social erasure and asserts their social and political agency.¹²

The following lines of the poem chronicle the subjugation, exploitation, and deadly abuse that African Americans were subjected to in the course of American history:

The recurring epistrophe and ellipses signal that these crimes were frequent and committed on an enormous scale. The gaps prompt the reader to try to find fitting words to fill in the blanks. In the process, they realize that there is always more than one way to complete the sentence in a meaningful way. The erasure thus suggests that the losses were too far-reaching and fundamental to be listed comprehensively. It draws the reader’s attention not to particular wrongs but to the pattern that emerges, to the systemic character of the violence.

As the poem unfolds, the tension between what is present on the page and what is absent because it has been erased from the text and in historical reality, as well as between what can be articulated and what exceeds direct representation, opens up a reflexive space in which the reader can reconsider dominant narratives about the foundations and history of the US. The poem’s stance toward its present/absent intertext is ambivalent. It revises yet does not completely reject its source. On the one hand, it draws on the Declaration as a template, using the original words of the grievance section and maintaining its rhetorical pattern of parallel repetitions, thus evoking its argument for the right to resist tyranny. On the other hand, the erasure poem’s elisions redefine both the nature of the injustice and its perpetrators, reminding us that the “life, liberty, and happiness” that the white colonists claimed as their “inalienable rights” were founded on the enslavement and oppression of Africans and African Americans. Slavery was not incidental but foundational to the development of American society. The poem’s conclusion underlines this point:

We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here.

In the last lines, Smith retains all of the words of one phrase, yet inserts two-line breaks. The original sentence reads, “He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands” (Declaration of Independence). By breaking up the preserved phrase “taken Captive on the high Seas to bear” into three lines, Smith creates an effect of disintegration and dislocation. The reader has to trace the sparse words across the blank zones of the page and read the dispersed textual fragments against the background of the unspoken or excised.

The evocative gaps and blank spaces of “Declaration” render palpable the losses and absences caused by colonialism and slavery. They dramatize historical processes of obliteration and reveal the silences of the original text surrounding the injustices and human costs of American nation building. We read the words on the page in recognition of what is missing. The tension between the erasure’s published, unpublished, reworked, and republished words encourages the readers to reconsider the nation’s self-image, its past and present in the light of racial discrimination and systemic racism.

3. Combining Appropriative and Constraint-Based Practices

As a technique and procedure for refashioning and repurposing anterior texts by partially obliterating them, erasures bring together two practices that belong to different cultural realms and traditionally have opposite trajectories: redaction and constraint-based appropriative poetics. Erasures delete, obscure, efface, cover up, or remove appropriated text, drawing on a repertoire of redaction practices that are also used for censorship and serve to suppress free speech or to control the circulation of information by keeping it out of the public record. The redaction of the Mueller report by the Trump administration provides a recent example of the latter. Erasure poets adopt these techniques, however, to create new work, increasing the flow of language and ideas. And a significant number of writers use erasure to critique or redress practices of silencing and social erasure: “An erasure poem may look like a redacted document, but it has the opposite aim: to elucidate a hidden truth, not hide an obvious one; to create something new, not just remove what’s there” (Quinlan).¹³ Poets like Holmes, Layli Long Soldier, Metres, Philip, Solmaz Sharif, and Smith erase appropriated texts to expose and refute the rhetoric and politics of colonialism, slavery, genocide, warfare, political persecution, torture, police violence, and forms of social subjugation that have literally obliterated human lives and cultures.

Because they reframe the appropriated documents by partially obscuring them, erasures demonstrate in often surprising ways the power of appropriative poetry to “extend the document,” to use Rukeyser’s well-known phrase (146). Smith’s erasure, for instance, asks us to reconsider the Declaration of Independence and, by extension, the historical record by telling “a story that can only be told by not telling” (Philip 191). Erasures are particularly good at turning the tables on the documents they use, not only recontextualizing or repurposing them but also revising them, reconfiguring their retained words in a way that changes their meaning and may attribute them to new speakers. Erasure is a technique that lends itself to writing back, as Smith’s “Declaration” shows.¹⁴

Yet, just as the poem can extend the document, the document can extend the poem. Metres points out that “the poem itself can be extended through the document, given a breadth or authority that the lyric utterance may not reach on its own.” Obviously, Smith’s “Declaration” does not draw on the cultural authority of the Declaration of Independence to justify its critique or lend gravitas to its vision—as, for instance, the suffragist Declaration of Sentiments (1848) did—yet the poem depends for its overall effect and meaning on the source text and its immense cultural significance.¹⁵ The reader’s recognition that “Declaration” is a revision of the Declaration of Independence adds historical depth and political relevance to both the words on the page and the process of erasure that created the poem. Since the figuration of text and deletion marks in poetic erasures continually reminds the readers of the compositional process of obliteration and salvaging that produced the poem, they necessarily read the poem with and against its intertext.

In light of the document’s power to extend the poem, the selection of the source text is usually a pivotal conceptual step in the process of creating an erasure.¹⁶ It is a strategic choice that determines the vocabulary the poets can use and connects their work to a specific intertextual network, discursive field, and sociocultural context. Holmes, for instance, drew on the poems that Emily Dickinson wrote in the first years of the American Civil War for her erasures about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in THE MS OF M Y KIN (2009), thus opening up a linguistic and poetic treasure trove, as well as a historical vista for her poems’ inquiry into the politics of present-day warfare and the exclusionary dynamics of public discourse. For Holmes, the relation between erasure and source text is one of “collaboration,” each layer of the text potentially inflecting the other: “It allows Dickinson's original word ‘Transport’ (for example) to be read as designating a literal military vehicle while still retaining her original meaning, luminescent and now tinged with irony, underneath” (“Janet Holmes”). Although Smith’s and Holmes’s erasures stand in opposite relation to their sources—refutation vs. affiliation—the erasure poems in both cases extend their prior texts and are extended by them.

By committing to use only the words that their selected source texts provide, typically in the original word order and often in situ, and by working with the given linguistic and graphic material according to rules they have set for themselves in advance, erasure poets intentionally limit their poetic options. They adopt constraints as a generative compositional technique. This situates erasure in the tradition of constraint-based procedural writing. As its varied twentieth- and twenty-first–century history from Dada to Oulipo, from Fluxus to Language poetry to conceptual writing, amply demonstrates, working with constraints and procedures that limit their linguistic, rhetorical, and formal choices, and substituting procedures for undirected creative processes, paradoxically, can enable writers to break free from cognitive habits, representational routines, literary conventions, and social norms, as well as move beyond the merely personal.¹⁷

Holmes’s THE M S OF M Y KIN exemplifies the creative and critical potential that literary erasure possesses as a combination of appropriative and constraint-based practices. In her introduction to her collection on her publisher’s website, Holmes lists the rules she adopted for her erasure of Dickinson’s poetry and places her approach in the tradition of “Oulipian restriction” (“Janet Holmes”). For Holmes, the choice of anterior text and technique is enabling. It affiliates her with a precursor she admires, as the volume’s title “the manuscript of my kin” indicates, and presents her with a vocabulary and procedure that decreases the linguistic and conceptual difficulty of writing about the wars. The epigraph to the volume, lines from Dickinson’s poem #184, suggests this difficulty: “If it had no pencil, / Would it try mine—” (qtd. in Holmes, THE MS).¹⁸ The title of Holmes’ collection is an erasure of the title of the Franklin reading edition of THEPoeMS OFEMilYDicKINson. Holmes took the 300 poems that Dickinson wrote during the first years of the Civil War and erased them to create new poems that address the fallout of 9/11—the so-called war on terror and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.¹⁹ Instead of revising her source text to turn it against itself, as Smith does in “Declaration,” Holmes samples Dickinson’s poems, appropriating her precursor’s words to develop a poetic language that allows her to express dissent amid political doublespeak, misinformation, and media overload.

To alert readers to her source text, Holmes relies on paratext. The cover cites both authors but visually privileges Holmes’ input with the letters of her title boldfaced against the faded yellowish brown of the original title. The back cover reverses this relationship, offering rows of cropped images of Dickinson against a single picture of Holmes. In addition, each poem has a header that lists the numbers of the original poems in the Franklin edition.

This identification is pertinent because Dickinson’s work has had an extremely turbulent editorial history.²⁰ Although she wrote nearly 1,800 poems and extensive correspondence, she only published ten poems and one letter during her lifetime. All publications were anonymous. Dickinson kept her poems in unbound manuscript sets and, when she was in her late twenties to mid-thirties, copied about 800 of them into hand-sewn booklets called fascicles (Loeffelholz). There are many theories about why Dickinson never published—a complex constellation of individual and sociocultural factors, including health issues, high sensitivity, extended periods of grieving, caregiving responsibilities, and the gender and sexuality politics that shaped both social life and the dynamics of literary culture.²¹ Access to the literary field was regulated by male editors and publishers, which posed challenges for Dickinson that were exacerbated by questions of genre and style. Poetry was a particularly male-identified genre, and Dickinson’s poems were highly innovative and defied formal and thematic conventions. After her death, editors revised Dickinson’s manuscripts as they saw fit. They tore apart the fascicles, changed the order of the poems, added titles, altered words, and normalized the unorthodox spelling, punctuation, and grammar. As a result, Dickinson’s poems exist in numerous versions, as Martha Nell Smith and Alexandra Socarides show in their editorial histories for Dickinson in Context (2013). Therefore, if Holmes wanted her audience to read her erasures against the original, she had to indicate the exact edition she had used.

In her erasures, Holmes retains the sequence and relative spatial positions of Dickinson’s words and lines but otherwise visually expunges the original. As a result, her layout appears spacious and fragmented and does not evoke the cramped pages of the Franklin edition. Holmes mines Dickinson’s poems for the linguistic possibilities they offer and appropriates Dickinson’s words to portray and criticize the war on terror. To consider one of Holmes’ poems in detail:

The poem offers a straightforward narrative: a man who publicly spoke truth to power was punished for treason. We are not told who “they” are, only that they have the means to “shut up”—that is, to silence, imprison, or kill—their opponents, which makes the conspicuous truthteller arguably a dissident or whistleblower. The poem results from the erasure of four Dickinson poems (#445–448). For brevity’s sake, I will focus on the relations between the style and thematic concerns of the first of these poems and Holmes’ erasure.

In this poem, Dickinson considers her identity as a female poet. The speaker remembers that she was disciplined as a girl to be quiet, in the senses of being both physically still and silent. Using the comparison to a bird who is put in a cage that is open to the sky, she gleefully notes the absurdity of this attempt. The tone of the poem is mocking. This poet is not intimidated; she will not lead the prosaic existence society expects of her. The speaker’s claim to intellectual freedom is supported by two of Dickinson’s signature moves: a term, here the word “still,” is used but put in quotation marks or placed under erasure, then given a new meaning. And the poem ends on a dash, resisting closure.²² Dickinson herself lived her speaker’s form of rebellion. She led a reclusive life but, in the privacy of her study, she wrote innovative poetry unconstrained by the literary and social conventions of her time.

Holmes’s erasure retains from Dickinson’s poem only the words, “They shut up / For Treason / Him.” The meaning of Dickinson’s poem is inverted. Whereas her speaker triumphs over repression, the truthteller in Holmes’ poem falls victim to persecution. The comparison with the original makes Holmes’ poem sound even bleaker. The erasure possesses none of Dickinson’s exuberant imagery or taunting voice. It is as if “they” had not only silenced the dissident but also curtailed Holmes’ expressive reach. In contrast to Dickinson’s poem, there is no dramatized speaker but an impersonal voice reporting on the situation. The only shift occurs in the penultimate line, when the exclamation “Oh, Reward” dips into an emotionally charged register, yet the pathos is immediately undermined because the last line appears ironic in light of the man’s punishment.

The poem’s tendency toward depersonalization is typical for constraint-based appropriative poetry—a strand of poetic practice that has been dominated in the last two decades by conceptual poetry, broadly construed along the lines of Kenneth Goldsmith and Craig Dworkin’s anthology, Against Expression (2011). In conceptual writing, procedural practices and techniques of sampling, recycling, and repurposing are frequently combined to bypass subjectivity and foreground the materiality of language. Conceptual works that refashion “found materials in ways involving procedure, constraint, or more ‘simple’ annexations[,]” Goldman points out, “tend to attenuate or substantially mediate subjective authorial expression[.]” Yet “their main purpose lies in a revelatory hyperbole or deconstruction of content through arbitrary though telling operations.” Conceptual writing severs words or documents from their habitual contexts and embeds them in new frameworks to highlight how processes of selecting, arranging, and framing linguistic material generate or diminish meaning. Although they do not aim at original expression, these constraint-based appropriative texts are still “highly authored works” (Goldman) that reflect the poetics and conceptual objectives of the writers who annex, reproduce, and reframe the found material.

Erasure poetry shares common ground with conceptual poetry as a form of constraint-based appropriative writing. Yet, while conceptual writers often commit to a particular procedure to explore and execute a specific idea or concept in a given work, erasure poets engage with their appropriated source in a rule-based yet open-ended, rather than predetermined, process.²³ The selection of a prior text as basis and of specific rules for the process of erasure limits their range of poetic choices—a condition that the poets might experience as liberating because it draws them out of their stylistic habits and compositional routines and might present them with new linguistic and thematic material, moving them beyond the already known, tried, and personal, as we have seen in Holmes’s case. Yet the process of erasure typically does not consist of a predictable or fixed sequence of steps, as is often true of conceptual writing, but unfolds in the form of a dialogue between poet and source text as a series of creative decisions about which elements the poet will keep and which they will obliterate. Erasure poets deconstruct and replicate but they also construct and generate: “The books have been called ‘found poems,’ but I don’t consider them as such,” Mary Ruefle insists about her erasures, for instance. “I certainly didn’t ‘find’ any of these pages, I made them in my head, just as I do my other work.” Even in conceptual writing, Perloff observes, the “citational or appropriative text, however unoriginal its actual words and phrases, is always the product of choice—and hence of individual taste” (169). With regard to erasure poetry, we can say, then, that the poems, although their words are always borrowed, are the product of the many creative choices and the back-and-forth between poet and anterior text, which registers on the page as an oscillation between present and absent elements.

Holmes’s appropriation of Dickinson’s poetry is an attempt to examine the rhetoric, ideological underpinnings, and social and political realities of the American war on terror by responding to it with words lifted from another writer and a different historical context, the Civil War. Dickinson’s language serves Holmes as both raw material and a contrastive foil that brings into sharper relief present language use. The linguistic and typographic form of the erasure enacts the destruction, censorship, and silencing that the poems thematize. While Holmes’ erasures are mainly oriented toward their contemporary context and sample Dickinson’s words to intervene in current public debates, the technique allows surprising connections between the un/published layers of the text to emerge. In the erasure poem above, a resonance emerges between Dickinson’s rebuttal of the gender politics of her time that would silence her as a female poet and Holmes’s poem about the censorship or even deadly abuse of political adversaries that suggests an overarching concern of the un/published text with dynamics of coercion, silencing, and exclusion. THE MS OF M Y KIN does not explicitly thematize the relations between the poetics and politics of the erasures and those of Dickinson’s poems but leaves it up to the readers to explore how Holmes’s poems and their intertexts inflect and extend each other. Yet, by indicating for each erasure which of Dickinson’s poems from the Franklin reading edition it reworks, the collection directs the reader back to its obliterated source.

4. Textile Erasure: Mending the Elisions of Print

In comparison, other erasures are more centrally concerned with their stance toward the texts they appropriate. Smith’s “Declaration,” for instance, prompts readers to reconsider the redacted founding document from a contemporary antiracist perspective. While Smith’s work develops a critique of its source text, other erasures aim to pay homage to their intertexts, such as Ronald Johnson’s erasure of John Milton’s Paradise Lost in radi os (1977) or Bervin’s celebration of Dickinson’s poetry in The Dickinson Composites Series (2004–2008, 2022-present). Like Smith’s and Holmes’s erasures, Bervin’s work encourages us to reread the cited and reframed original. In this case, the erasure does not aim to unmask and debunk or to sample and repurpose the prior text though, as Smith and Holmes do respectively, but to pay tribute to and recover the precursor’s work by pushing readers to reflect on the conditions and politics of poetic composition and publication.

Bervin’s Dickinson Composites Series seeks to enlarge our understanding of Dickinson’s poetics—especially her method of notation and editorial practices, as well as the conditions of her work’s participation in print culture—by highlighting the aesthetics of the fascicles. In her textile artwork, Bervin focuses on the visual appearance and material shape of Dickinson’s unpublished manuscripts. The Dickinson Composites Series consists of eight large-scale embroidered quilts. The artworks are made of cotton batting backed with muslin and are six to eight feet long (Bervin, “Dickinson Composites”). In exhibitions, they are mounted next to one another. Most of the quilts contain few or no words. Instead, they present in red silk thread the variant and punctuation marks of the unpublished booklets in which Dickinson preserved her poems. In a palimpsestic display, each artwork presents on a single sheet all of the marks contained in the pages of one specific fascicle.

“There are some punctuations that are interesting and there are some punctuations that are not,” Gertrude Stein quipped (214).²⁴ Dickinson’s idiosyncratic use of dashes is certainly interesting for at least two reasons: first, it often opens the poems up to the unexpressed, adding to their latent meanings. Second, in the handwritten manuscripts, the dashes possess a unique gestural quality. In contrast to their typographic representation in print, the dashes in Dickinson’s handwritten manuscripts vary in length and position. Some are slanting upwards, others down; many appear close to the bottom rather than near the middle of the preceding words. In addition, Dickinson frequently noted variant words in her manuscripts by placing small plus signs or crosses near words or at the beginning or end of lines and listing the variations below or next to the poems.

Bervin enlarges these marks in her artwork. By obliterating most of the words of the poems but keeping all of the punctuation and variant marks, the erasures render visible both the quantity and the variety of Dickinson’s notations. The large format of the embroidery, the robustness of the cotton sheets, and the bright red color of the silk thread confer substantiality to textual details that may seem incidental and negligible on the paper page. Looming large at us in carefully crafted textile shapes, Bervin’s embroidered marks lend a sensual material presence and aesthetic significance to the graphic intricacies and subtleties of Dickinson’s handwritten notations. Bervin’s choice of color and medium is not accidental but modeled on Dickinson’s use of red and white twisted string to stab-bind the fascicles. In larger cultural terms, sewing and quilting are often, of course, historically female crafts. Bervin’s validation of this gendered tradition is significant since the slow recognition of Dickinson’s work and its fierce editorial history resulted in part from the gender politics of American literary culture, in which poetry was a male-identified genre.

Efforts to publish Dickinson’s work have posed severe challenges to critics and editors intent on reproducing her poetry accurately because Dickinson never prepared manuscripts for publication. She did not authorize print versions of her poems, and her handwritten experiments with orthography, punctuation, lineation, page layout, and other aspects of poetic composition resist the typographical conventions of print. In Dickinson studies, the question of whether the unpublished handwritten manuscripts should be granted primacy over their typographic interpretation and representation in print has been the subject of critical debates since Franklin’s publication of the two-volume The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson: A Facsimile Edition (1981).²⁵ Yet for general readers, for whom the early scholarly facsimile editions were much too expensive and unwieldy, the contrast between the unpublished and published versions of Dickinson’s poetry came into view only when the rise of digital scanning and print technologies, and open-access digital archives, made high-resolution images of Dickinson’s poetry readily accessible. Since 2013, one can browse high-resolution scans of the poems and letters in the open-access Emily Dickinson Archive and compare the handwritten poems with their different published versions.²⁶ In addition, several books have appeared with full-color facsimiles of collection items in the last years, such as The Gorgeous Nothings (2013) and its short giftbook edition Envelope Poems (2016), edited by Bervin and Marta Werner. The handwritten versions take precedence for Bervin and Werner. Their volumes pair visual reproductions of the handwritten poems with (typo)graphic transcriptions that are intended to function “as a key into — not a replacement for — the manuscripts” (Bervin, “Studies” 12). The comparative media approach allows the published print version to complement and illuminate, rather than eclipse, the unpublished handwritten original.²⁷

Unlike the facsimile editions, Bervin’s remediation of Dickinson’s poetry in her Composites Series does not aim at an exact photorealistic reproduction of all the details of Dickinson’s handwritten manuscripts but obliterates most of the text to concentrate on one element—the punctuation and variation marks. The disappearing of the source text functions here as a method to focus the viewer’s attention. Confronted with the unusual sight of abstracted, enlarged, and decontextualized punctuation marks freed from their syntactical positions and grammatical functions and highlighted by the blank space surrounding them, the viewer begins to contemplate exactly those visual and material qualities of Dickinson’s handwritten texts that the print editions of her work elide. Bervin’s erasures can be understood as a form of “redocumentation” (Leong 55). They put on display the poetics of variation and indeterminacy and the handcrafted aesthetics that the fascicles possess, while they also point to the erasure of these constitutive features in the print versions of Dickinson’s poetry.²⁸ The artwork’s configuration of present and absent, visible and invisible, elements invites us to consider the relations between the unpublished and published versions of Dickinson’s work. By making us look at the retained punctuation and variation marks in their unfamiliar handwritten appearance and transfigured textile shape and prompting us to imagine the absent text, the erasures may reframe the way we read the print editions of Dickinson’s poetry. They allow us to recognize how the capacities and conventions of print have shaped but also limited our understanding of Dickinson’s innovative poetry. In this sense, Bervin’s embroidered erasures are an act of “mending,” as stitching often is (Bervin, “Dickinson Composites”).

5. Coda

Solmaz Sharif has proposed that one of the differences between the use of redaction by the state and by erasure poets lies in their orientation toward the text’s configuration of legible and illegible sections. The primary concern of censors, Sharif notes, lies with what they render invisible. They “[c]are not for what is left behind, but for what is crossed out.” Erasure poets, by contrast, primarily focus on the words of the appropriated text that they retain, Sharif argues. They “[c]are for what is left behind so that erasure has an additive or highlighting effect” (“Near Transitive Properties”). While I find Sharif’s comparison between censors and poets suggestive, I hope that my analysis of the erasures by Smith, Holmes, and Bervin has demonstrated that erasure poems care about both the retained and the deleted sections. They present a combination of text and erasure marks to the readers, prompting us to consider both the legible and the obliterated parts of the text and the relations between them. Erasures are un/published texts whose meaning and effect derive from their configuration of words and elisions. To understand them as erasures, as poems generated through the partial obliteration of an appropriated text, we have to take note of both what is present on and what is absent from the page. This entails that we read the erasures in light of their source texts.

Because they are created through a combination of appropriation and redaction, erasures have a palimpsestic quality. Each word of an erasure poem derives from and belongs to another text. There are no new words, only fewer. There are new gaps, however. In the memorable words of the composer Lucas Foss, who Johnson quotes in radi os, “I composed the holes” (i). Erasure artists can lay claim to the absences. The elisions reconfigure the retained material in a way that may allow new speakers, viewpoints, themes, narratives, or formal concerns to emerge. As a result, each word on the page is shared by two texts, two writers, “two moments of composition” (Dworkin 143). Erasures signify through the overlay and interplay of original text and new poem, inviting a “palimpsestic double-reading” (Borsuk et al.). Whether we conceive of this relation in temporal or spatial terms and see the erasure poem as either emerging from the disappearing document or hidden inside or superimposed on the obliterated prior text, erasures prompt a layered reading that directs the reader back to the source and its sociocultural contexts while drawing them deeper into the imaginative and discursive world of the erasure poem.

Made of salvaged and expunged parts, erasure poems offer a record of the poet’s compositional process and invite readers to contemplate and interpret redaction processes. They highlight the procedures, materials, and media through and in which literary texts are written and read, drawing our attention to the conditions of literary production and reception and to the processes through which we produce meaning.²⁹ In addition, erasures possess a structure that can be charged with symbolic meaning and used as a formal analogy for discursive and sociocultural processes of annihilation or invisibilization. The erasures by Smith, Holmes, and Bervin that I have discussed in this essay pursue different thematic, formal, and political interests, yet they have in common that they function as structural analogies for social erasures and as metacommentaries on how persons and groups are included or excluded from public discourse and how knowledge is articulated and circulated or silenced and suppressed. For poetic erasures to perform this cultural work, it is paramount that their source texts are published works, or that they have entered the public record or archive in some other form, and that the erasures indicate these intertexts and draw the reader’s attention to the presence/absence of their sources and the ongoing dialogue between the vanishing prior text and the emerging new poem. In this way, erasure poetry opens up new possibilities for writers to intervene in public conversations about social justice. It allows them to destabilize the boundaries between the published and unpublished, between what is heard and what is silenced, between the sayable and what exceeds representation. Erasure poetry allows us to read in recognition of what is absent or missing and to imagine new voices and perspectives emerging from the cleared and transformed spaces of the page.

Notes

Works Cited