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Posts tagged "blackout poems"
When Rauschenberg met De Kooning
The incredible story of Robert Rauschenberg walking up to Willem de Kooning’s house with a bottle of Jack Daniels and asking him for a drawing he could erase.
Not long before he died, Robert Rauschenberg told the story of the Erased De Kooning Drawing in this BBC video. He’s a good storyteller. When he finished his erasure, some folks accused him of vandalizing a de Kooning, saying he destroyed art. It wasn’t vandalism, he tells the interviewer. Then what was it? “Poetry,” he says.
Nice long piece by Jeannie Vanasco this month in The Believer (now on Tumblr!) about writing by erasure. A lot of the artists mentioned (Tom Phillips, Mary Ruefle, Thomas Jefferson…) will be familiar to anybody who’s read the history chapter of Newspaper Blackout. (Unfortunately, Blackout was not one of the texts mentioned.)1
What I like about the piece is that unlike some writers who take an apologetic or condescending tone towards erasures, Vanasco actually champions the form:
Why erase the works of other writers? The philosophical answer is that poets, as Wordsworth defines them, are “affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present.” The More practical answer: compared to writing, erasing feels easy.
But I am here to convince you: to erase is to write, style is the consequence of the writer’s omissions, and the writer is always plural.
To erase is to leave something else behind.
Like Kenneth Goldsmith, Vanasco even uses the form in her creative writing class at NYU (here’s the PDF of the syllabus)
the motto of Modernism, Ezra Pound’s “Make it new,” is a translation of Confucius who borrowed it from Emperor T’ang who inscribed on his bathtub “Every day make it new.” I want you to take existing poems and stories by other writers and make these works new. How? By making them your own. How? By imitating their styles.
She points to Allen Ginsberg, who was very open about his influences:
Ginsberg shows us that by imitating the style of other writers, as well as by resisting them, a writer develops his or her own style. Erasure is simply an exaggerated form of writing. “We say that an author is original when we cannot trace the hidden transformation that others underwent in his mind,” Valery wrote. “What a man does either repeats or refutes what someone else has done—repeats it in other tones, refines or amplifies or simplifies it.” But instead of concealing or denying their influences, erasurists acknowledge that they have come from somewhere, not nowhere, and make clear the chaotic process of creating art.
It’s a great piece — anybody who’s interested in Newspaper Blackout or Steal Like An Artist will enjoy it.
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I heard later from Jeannie that Newspaper Blackout was part of a section that had to be cut due to length. :) ↩
Why Jean-Michel Basquiat crossed out words:
I cross out words so you will see them more: the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them.
Screenshot from the great documentary, Jean-Michel Basquiat: Radiant Child
Clive Thompson (@pomeranian99) turned me on to this take on subtractive thinking by George Dyson, author of Darwin Among The Machines:
In the North Pacific ocean, there were two approaches to boatbuilding. The Aleuts (and their kayak-building relatives) lived on barren, treeless islands and built their vessels by piecing together skeletal frameworks from fragments of beach-combed wood. The Tlingit (and their dugout canoe-building relatives) built their vessels by selecting entire trees out of the rainforest and removing wood until there was nothing left but a canoe.
The Aleut and the Tlingit achieved similar results — maximum boat / minimum material — by opposite means. The flood of information unleashed by the Internet has produced a similar cultural split. We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unneccessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.
Boy, 13, Busted For Illegal Marker Possession
Be careful out there, folks.
(Thanks, @mubay)
(Source: newspaperblackout)
Yeah! I’ve been messing around with the app—if only you could select which words to erase, it would be brilliant. It’s kind of fun to just hold it in front of an article and watch it flicker and freak out and show/erase random words. Here’s a couple of screengrabs of Emily Dickinson and The New York Times:
Thanks, y’all.
I just found out that Newspaper Blackout was the #6 best-selling book of poetry in 2010!
(Source: newspaperblackout)
![Tree of Codes, by Jonathan Safran Foer
New Yorker:
For his next book, “Tree of Codes,” [Foer] excised sections of a book by Bruno Schulz—literally cutting words from the pages—to let his own story emerge. “I would encourage everyone to do this,” Safran Foer said
Read more about the book
Also: Jonathan Safran Foer’s New Book Will Have A Few Words And A Plot
UPDATE: Yes, folks, I’m familiar with Tom Phillips’ A Humument. I write about it and other books of these kind of literary experiments in Newspaper Blackout](http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_la6vkqPI4R1qz6f4bo1_500.jpg)
For his next book, “Tree of Codes,” [Foer] excised sections of a book by Bruno Schulz—literally cutting words from the pages—to let his own story emerge. “I would encourage everyone to do this,” Safran Foer said
Also: Jonathan Safran Foer’s New Book Will Have A Few Words And A Plot
UPDATE: Yes, folks, I’m familiar with Tom Phillips’ A Humument. I write about it and other books of these kind of literary experiments in Newspaper Blackout
