Erasure (artform)

Erasure is a form of found poetry or found 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. 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 requires purposeful decision making. What does one want done to the original text? Does a gesture celebrate, denigrate, subvert, or efface the source completely? One can erase intuitively by focusing on musical and thematic elements or systematically by following a specific process regardless of the outcome.

Here is a nonce example using text from the November 2003 version of the English Wikipedia Main Page:

complete

and free

we started

and are

visit

experiment

you can

right now

Several contemporary writers/artists have adopted this form to achieve a range of cognitive or symbolic effects.

Examples

Doris Cross appears to have been among the earliest to utilize this technique, beginning in 1965 with her "Dictionary Columns" book art. d.a. levy also worked in this mode at about the same time.

• Radi Os - Ronald Johnson's Radi Os is a long poem deconstructed from the text of Milton's Paradise Lost.^[2]
• A Humument - Tom Phillips' A Humument is a major work of book art and found poetry deconstructed from a Victorian novel.
• 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.
• Nets - Jen Bervin's Nets is an erasure of Shakespeare's sonnets.^[3]
• Hope Tree - Frank Montesonti's Hope Tree is a book of erasure poems based on R. Sanford Martin's How to Prune Fruit Trees.
• 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.
• Erasing Infinite - Jenni B. Baker creates erasure poetry from David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, one page at a time.
• The ms of my kin - Janet Holmes's The ms of my kin (2009) erases the poems of Emily Dickinson written in 1861-62, the first few years of the Civil War, to discuss the more contemporary Iraq War.
• 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.
• Of Lamb - Matthea Harvey's Of Lamb is a book-length erasure of a biography of Charles Lamb.
• 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).
• Voyager - Srikanth Reddy's Voyager is another book-length erasure, of Kurt Waldheim's autobiography.
• Tree of Codes - Jonathan Safran Foer did a book-length erasure of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz which he entitled Tree of Codes.
• The Found Poetry Review - A print journal publishing found poetry that goes beyond the simple addition of line breaks to found language and creates a piece whose form and meaning differs from the original.

Use in representations of the Holocaust

Jonathan Safran Foer did a book-length erasure of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz which he entitled Tree of Codes. 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. Safran-Foer writes:"All that we have of his fiction are two slim collections, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under The Sign of the Hourglass. On the basis of these, Schulz is considered one of the most important artists of the 20th century. Their long shadow--the work lost to history--is, in many ways, the story of the century." 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.^[4] Safran-Foer's approach to the Holocaust as an "unrepresentable subject" recalls the use of negative space in the poetry of Dan Pagis.^[5][6]

Representing government secrecy

Jenny Holzer's Redaction Paintings may be considered a work of erasure.

The work 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. Beautiful in their own right, the works are also haunting reminders of what really goes on behind the scenes in the American military/political power system. Documents address counter-terrorism, prisoner abuse, and even 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.^[7]

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."^[8]

See also

• A Humument
• Tree of Codes
• Absent Things As If They Are Present

Notes