However, they are not the same thing at all.Įrasure poet M. Many assume that they are the same thing because we use these words interchangeably to refer to poems. This kind of misidentification is common, and it has led to the marginalization of blackout poetry as an independent category of found poetry and has contributed to a misunderstanding of what both erasure and blackout poetry are. The words are still there, just covered by sharpie. So I grabbed a sharpie and went to work.” While O’Hare here is obscuring, altering, and manipulating these abusers’ words, I argue they do not erase them. They say, “I just really wanted to erase their words. In the introduction of the collection, however, they refer to the poems as erasures. In 2018, for example, blackout poet Isobel O’Hare published all this can be yours (2018), a collection of blackout poems made from the apology statements of sexual abusers during the #MeToo movement. They are actually blackout poems.Įven blackout poets often misidentify their own work and refer to it as erasure over blackout poetry. Examples include Tom Phillips’ A Humument, (1970) Jen Bervin’s Nets (2004), and Austin Kleon’s Newspaper Blackouts (2010), just to name a few.” While their definition is correct, all the examples Found Poetry Review lists are not erasure poems. Most current literature conflates blackout and erasure poems as the same thing, even Found Poetry Review, which defines erasure poetry as when “Poets take an existing source (usually limited to one or a few pages) and erase the majority of the text, leaving behind select words and phrases that, when read in order, compose the poem. Even though there is variation in the how, they all do the same thing, which is obscure the source text but never remove it. Poets paint, collage, scribble with pen and pencil and crayon over pages of books and newspapers and all kinds of other texts. There are many ways to cover the preexisting text. only these four categories, there is an additional fifth that is often lumped into erasure poetry: blackout poetry.īlackout poetry refers to any poem in which the author covers a majority of a source text in favor of leaving a handful of words exposed to form a poem. Though Found Poetry Review, and many other publications list. Even though these methods are all a little different, they are all a part of the same subgenre of poetry: found poetry.ĭillard describes this found poetry as “pawing through popular culture like sculptors on trash heaps… hold and wave aloft usable artifacts and fragments: jingles and ad copy, menus and broadcasts.” These found poets take texts and change them in some way, creating something akin to “ the literary version of a collage.” We know through the aforementioned examples (and those represented are only the tiniest fraction of ways found poets are creating), that there are many ways to create these kinds of poems however, we can identify several common methodologies and thus categories of found poetry.įound Poetry Review, one of the few magazines that publishes only found poems, identifies four categories: erasure (poems created through erasing parts of a source text and leaving others behind), cento (combining lines from other works into a new poem), cut-up (physically cutting up a source text and rearranging its pieces into a new piece) and free-form excerpting and remixing (excerpting words and phrases from source text(s) and arranging them to create something new). Drew Myron adds line breaks to and rearranges the instructions of medical bottles. Tom Phillips paints over the same pages of a Victorian novel again and again. Jen Bervin stitches over sentences with a needle and thread. Tristian Tzara pulls the words of newspaper articles out of a bag on stage and arranges them in front of an audience. Mary Ruefle uses white out to cover words. Annie Dillard, for instance, erases, while Jonathan Safran Foer cuts out words, leaving some dangling, just barely still attached to the page. Over the past century, poets have gotten rather good at this navigation and separating themselves from others via their unique methods.
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