The Practice of Poetic Erasure

Catalog description

Choose a book - any book. Choose a song or film, choose a building, painting, or an epic. Now, imagine erasing most of the words (or images from that book, film, space) in order to create, or discover, a wholly new different story: your story, or another's story, some expression the original writer or artist themselves could not have conceived of when they created their text originally. This, crudely, is the definition of poetic erasure. Found poetry. If it sounds vile, it is. It can also be brilliant, emboldened, politically exacting, tender, historically revelatory, sublime, and thrilling. More often than not, it is also heartbreaking. Through weekly slide shows, readings, discussions, and workshops, we will explore the history of contemporary poetic erasure, placing emphasis on what might have been - and what could be - if we read a book from any myriad of directions other than ways the author intended. Indeed, one of the best unforeseen strengths (gifts?) of poetic erasure is that it makes us keenly aware of history's unspoken often unconscious intentions. What might have happened, for example, if Shakespeare were a woman, a woman who decided to cut just a few more lines from her genius sonnets, choosing to create evocative early-modern avant-garde exploration instead? Or what might have taken place if a few of the English Romantics, in a communal renunciation of authorship, mashed all their poems into one much shorter, but anonymous, collective text? Who or what does the author become then? What if a Victorian writer had painted over the majority of her own novel, blocking out most of the words with opaque paint instead, dismissing altogether the habit of narrative cohesion? What does a "book" mean then? What is a "poem"? And what do these aesthetic gestures represent symbolically about our entwined cultures and histories? Perhaps most importantly, what occurs…