Blackout poetry
Blackout poetry, or erasure poetry, is a form of found poetry or found object art created by erasing words from an existing text in prose or verse and framing the result on the page as a poem. The results can be allowed to stand in situ or they can be arranged into lines or stanzas.
Writers and visual artists have adopted this form both to achieve a range of cognitive or symbolic effects and to focus on the social or political meanings of erasure. Blackout poetry 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 also draws attention to the original text.
History
Doris Cross appears to have been among the earliest to utilize this technique, beginning in 1965 with her "Dictionary Columns" book art. Other examples before 1980 include:- A Humument, Tom Phillips' 1970 major work of book art and found poetry deconstructed from a Victorian novel.
- Radi Os, Ronald Johnson's, long 1977 poem deconstructed from the text of Milton's Paradise Lost.
- Mans Wows – Jesse Glass' Mans Wows, 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.
The poetic form gained new political purpose online in 2017 in response to the Trump administration.
The tradition of concrete poetry and the works of visual artists such as d.a. levy have some relationship to this artform.
Use in representations of political or social themes
Government and military secrecy
Jenny Holzer's Redaction Paintings 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. The works are intended as reminders of the editing or erasure that goes on behind the scenes in the American military/political power system. Documents address counter-terrorism, prisoner abuse, and 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.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."
Seven Testimonies – Nick Flynn's "Seven Testimonies " in The Captain Asks a Show of Hands, is an erasure of the testimonies from prisoners at Abu Ghraib.
Holocaust
Jonathan Safran Foer's 2010 Tree of Codes is a book-length erasure of The Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz. 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. 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. Safran-Foer's approach to the Holocaust as an "unrepresentable subject" recalls the use of negative space in the poetry of Dan Pagis.Freedom and Slavery
Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith has written several erasure poems, including "Declaration" and "The Greatest Personal Privation".Poet Nicole Sealey wrote The Ferguson Report: An Erasure, a book length erasure of the Ferguson Report which comments on the Killing of Michael Brown and the subsequent Ferguson unrest. Her poem "Pages 22–29, an excerpt from the book, won a Forward Prize for Poetry in October 2021.