In a series of interviews that comprise one of the few sustained, critical investigations of erasure poetry, blogger Andrew David King for Kenyon Review asks the authors of seven of the most significant publications of contemporary erasure (all, but one, American) about the politics of their writing process. “I don’t think the act of doing it is political at all,” says Matthew Rohrer, co-author of a Gentle Reader!, an erasure of Romantic poems: “but … lots of political stuff comes out of it, and that’s just because that’s what we were engaged with at the time.”1 “Political?” repeats Travis MacDonald, author of The O Mission Repo, a book that he produced by crossing out and blurring the text of the 9-11 Commission Report: “No. I don’t think so. Not at all.”2 Srikanth Reddy, author of Voyager, an erasure of the memoir of Kurt Waldheim, finds the question “hard to answer”:
poeticizing a political text is of course an act that has a political aspect—but one that is very hard to pin down. Is it reclaiming the political as a source for aesthetic work? Is it a way to show that politics itself has a kind of poetics operating within it? I find myself waxing pretentious here, but I think these are real questions. I just don’t know how to answer them.3
Matthea Harvey says that she can see politics in a work of book-art that physically cuts up all the pages of a white supremacist text, but her own book, Of Lamb, which Harvey has produced by applying liquid white-out to text from a biography of Charles Lamb, “isn’t,” she insists, “meant to be a political act—more of an homage.”4 David Dodd Lee argues that an erasure’s political dimension depends entirely on what source texts are chosen. Because his own work appropriates the work of John Ashbery, whom Lee says resists calling his own poetry political, Lee likewise sees his own appropriations as equally without politics. Lee has also decided that Ashbery’s work has “implied permission” for Lee to perform the erasings and appropriation. Still, he admits, “being asked to think about it does (and did) occasionally make me nervous,” mainly because he anticipates having to answer to charges of copyright infringement.5
Only M. NourbeSe Philip, the Caribbean-identified Canadian of the group, affirms the political nature of her work. “Any strategy, even the lyric, can be political depending on context and intent,” she remarks:
The question, however, does give rise to an issue for writers like myself who come from countries and cultures that have been colonised: that is that many of our “master” narratives or documents are themselves the products of the coloniser, constructed on erasures of all types, who was physically exploiting the inhabitants of these countries and appropriating their cultures and their products for their own use.6
For Philip, the act of appropriating text resonates with other historical acts of appropriation. Philip says that she sees the poetic practice of erasure resonating with “erasures of all types” because she writes from the point of view of peoples whose histories and languages have been erased by colonial practices.
But writers do not need to identify with colonized peoples to affirm that the logic of stealing is at work in the various iterations of found poetry. Austin Kleon follows up his pop-market erasure Newspaper Blackout with a glossy manifesto-cum-coffee table book called Steal Like an Artist. Describing himself as “obsessed with collage,” Kleon writes: “[W]hen I was making the newspaper blackout work, I started noticing how many of my favorite artists used words like ‘steal’ and ‘borrow’ and ‘filch’ and ‘theft’ to describe their own methods.” When asked if he’s concerned about misrepresenting the ideas of others, Kleon responds that, although he “make[s] his living off copyrights …, I honestly don’t worry.… Other people’s ideas interest me only in terms of what I can do with them, where I can take them.”7 The difference in politics between Kleon and Philip, between commercial bricoleur and literary activist, lies not in whether or not they feel erasure is a kind of appropriation (they both feel it is), but in whether they assume or interrogate the artist’s unchecked entitlement to source materials.
The Americans in King’s interviews seem to understand politics to mean explicit, thematic engagements with “big-P” international politics (references to Bush = political; destroying a Holy War Book = political; making a nursery-rhyme-like picture book out of Charles Lamb’s biography = not political). When the poet who has defaced an internal report on 9-11 calls his book “not at all” political, however, I hear a denial not only of the inherent politicality of the source text, but also of the act of repossessing and reframing it. From the American erasurists, I detect a general reluctance to self-identify as political or to ascribe a set of values to erasure poetics. Only Philip describes her use of erasure as a formal choice necessitated by her urge to find a “redemptive strategy to deal with absences and erasures.”8 Philip’s insistence on poetics-as-politics affirms that formal approach can either challenge or trade upon dominant, culturally specific assumptions about how a text performs authority.
In this essay, I discuss some of the “significant works of erasure” from the Canadian literary field (that is, poetry published in the territories called Canada, composed by deleting, erasing, or hiding text from a source-work), and I suggest that collectively, poets working in these territories have been (as of 2014) more eager than their American counterparts to deploy erasure in strategies of explicitly politicized, cultural critique. I will first look at “No Comment” by Garry Morse—a poem that Lorraine Weir calls a “great central sequence of erasure poems,” all of which which appear in Discovery Passages, one of “the canonic texts of contemporary Indigenous and Canadian writing.”9 I then discuss Shane Rhodes’s “Wite Out,” an erasure poem from X, the book in which Rhodes makes found poetry of Canadian treaty documents. Then I analyze the relation of form to cultural politics in the book-length works The Place of Scraps by Jordan Abel, and Zong! by Marlene NourbeSe Philip. Finally, I contrast the ways that erasures written in the territories called Canada have worked with the gestures of silencing and with the gestures of American poet Vanessa Place.
Morse, Rhodes, Abel, and Philip all take up the trope of European colonialism as a wilful erasure of Indigenous cultures, and these writers focus their attention on colonialism’s textual-material practices. The poets choose, as their source texts, documents that have produced, justified, legalized, denied, aided, and abetted the violent silencing and dehumanization of various groups of people. In their approach, these poets differ from the American poets mentioned insofar as these Canadian writers and Indigenous writers do not simply enact their politics through the choice of a political document as source text (as Lee suggests), nor do these poets discover that their own concerns about prevailing party politics have guided their excising hand (as Rohrer has). Instead, these poets choose erasure as part of the “small-p” politics that Craig Dworkin describes as including “all relations of power, however local and miniscule, and the ethics of their distribution.”10 Rather than considering their erasures as poems that may or may not be propagandist or have politics “in” them, these poets are, in the very act of resorting to erasure, taking up the politics “of” the poem: “what is signified by its form, enacted by its structures, implicit in its philosophy of language, how it positions its reader, and a range of questions relating to the poem as material object—how it was produced, distributed, exhanged.”11 Or, as Smaro Kamboureli might put it, these contemporary poets writing from the territories called Canada are using erasure to “foreground the materiality of language” and to make readers aware of the power that language wields “as act (not [just] as representation).”12
“I have never understood the relationship between poetry and politics,” Garry Morse writes, in a conversation about Jack Spicer, whom he names as one of his key influences. Morse speculates that Spicer “felt that political issues abrogated language for its own peculiar motives, which is a kind of dishonesty.”13 For Morse, poets who are “knee-deep in political concerns [are] minds beset by the ceaseless ebb and flux of material concerns,” and are therefore unable to be the kind of Orphic, “babbling prophet(s)” that represent Morse’s ideal. Whereas most contemporary erasurists see themselves working in a lineage of visual and concrete poetry that traces itself back to continental European, inter-arts modernism, Morse situates himself loosely in the Black Mountain avant-garde tradition that fed the poetics of the Berkeley Renaissance and the Canadian West Coast.
Morse’s fragmentary, spatialized aesthetic shows fidelity to the Paterson-esque strategy of collage in the works of such poets as Robert Duncan, George Bowering, and Daphne Marlatt. The cascading, open-field lines in most of Discovery Passages weave Morse’s voice with fragments of quotation. Formally, Morse echoes an earlier generation of white, West Coast poets whose documentary, anthropologically inspired, found poetries are “tied to preoccupations with Canadian nation-building and its attendant immigration stories and mythologies,” and Morse extends a poetic tradition that has “functioned as a sort of literary archeology focused on recuperating and repositioning histories.”14
However, there is one thread of Discovery Passages in which Morse’s strategy of collage sustains and focuses its engagement to its particular source texts so that it can be read as erasure. In “No Comment,” Morse’s loose cascades tighten, and the lyric voice of the book, amidst which fragments usually flow, all but disappears. Thin columns of text, in italics, as though they are all epigraphs, fill the page. If the unitalicized text in Discovery Passages is Morse’s lyric voice, that voice in this thirty-page series decides not to speak, except to identify the authors of these short stacks of clipped lines. Here is one of the poems in this series:
considerable
crating
considerable
amount
labor
involved
segregating
exhibit
fair
amount
set on
belonging
Wm. M. Halliday, Indian Agent
June 23, 1922 15
The series documents the correspondence between government officials (among them Superintendent General Duncan Campbell Scott and John A. Macdonald) and Kwakwaka’wakw writers—a correspondence that belies the opportunism of officials who have criminalized potlatch, then have profited from the seizure and sale of potlatch-related artifacts. A narrative is discernable; at first the reader may wonder if the heartbreaking sequence is in fact an erasure or if it is a “creative” non-fiction. Morse has indeed used actual letters. Ironically, these official documents are themselves a kind of fiction: according to Christopher Bracken, the “potlatch” (a Chinook word meaning “gift” and a term not used in Kwak’wala) “was in fact invented by the nineteenth-century Canadian law that sought to destroy it,” and the letters themselves are evidence of “a colonialist discourse in the act of constructing fictions about certain First Nations and then deploying those fictions against them.”16
Morse’s redaction of these letters to a handful of key words and short phrases exposes the function of the missing text. By excising the officious bumpf that overlaid a tone of judicial objectivity onto language that legalized the dispossession of a people, Morse enacts a “reverse whitewashing”17 that lays bare the non-Indigenous authors’ contempt for their Indigenous correspondents. Procedurally, Morse’s erasure of the source text to make new poems is similar to minimalist erasures by Matthea Harvey and Ronald Johnson, but Morse does not, like these authors, primarily seek to mine a new, original lyric work from the source. The blank space around the words in “No Comment” is the same open field through which Morse projects the awareness that propels the rest of Discovery Passages. The white page of “No Comment” is an open field, alive to the history of suppression of the Kwak’wala language and Kwakwaka’wakw cultural practices. In this erasure, Morse embodies dignity and indignation by refusing to give his own breath to such a dialogue and by silently clearing space to listen to the banal, small language by which a people were misrepresented, criminalized, and dispossessed.
Morse thinks of his poet’s role as being a medium for peoples and lands. He does not “consider [him]self a visual artist or much of a conceptualizer,”18 so it would be false to align Morse too strongly with conceptual or procedural movements. “I do a lot of things unconsciously,” writes Morse, “which is another way of saying I steal.”19 Then, alluding perhaps to modernist sensibilities that prompted appropriations from non-European tradition, or to mid-twentieth-century Beat impulses to “get in touch with one’s inner ‘Indian,’” or to the stories of the Kwakwaka’wakw mistold by Canadian officials, he adds: “Another way of saying I steal stuff back.”20
Shane Rhodes creates the visual poems, cut-up poems, and collage poems in his book X by constraining himself to the language of the transcripts for the eleven Canadian Post-Confederation Treaties (the “numbered treaties”) and some of their associated documentation, recorded by the Government of Canada. At the beginning of X there is a reproduced photo of Duncan Campbell Scott, both a “Confederation Poet” and a former head of Indian Affairs, sitting in a canoe with eleven Indigenous guides. Scott is holding a book while being paddled down the Abitibi. From the writing of Scott’s personal secretary, Rhodes guesses that the book is very likely The Oxford Book of Poetry. Rhodes writes:
The Scott photograph seems the perfect metaphor for most of the poetry that has been and continues to be written in Canada—almost all of us are still in that boat reading the Oxford Book of Poetry while being paddled to our destination almost oblivious to the canoe, the paddlers, or the bush we are being paddled through. My previous books would fit comfortably in that canoe as well.… In X, I wanted to coax poetry out of that boat. I wanted it to get wet, dirty, ugly and messy. I could only do this by breaking it, perversely.21
One of Rhodes’s most obvious breaks from his earliest books, and from the historically “oblivious” poetry that “continues to be written in Canada,” is his shift toward the techniques of the historical, modernist avant-garde—a shift that he first began in Err and refines in X. Rhodes “breaks” an inherited line of institutionalized aesthetic values that have been complicit in mythologizing Canada’s colonial history. Of course, the techniques of found poetry, which Rhodes traces in Canada back to F. R. Scott’s Trouvailles: Poems from Prose and John Robert Colombo’s The Mackenzie Poems, have their own European roots and histories of cultural appropriation and racism. But Rhodes calls X his “attempt to learn … the colonisation which has shaped every part of my thinking,”22 such that these techniques in X become methodology, an inquiry into how to make an “anti-poem” that might be an antidote to the indoctrination of colonial ideology.
Rhodes turns to erasure in “Wite Out”—a text that appears as black type over very under-saturated black-and-white photographs of registration forms. Rhodes has applied strips of Wite Out correction tape to the forms. As is the case with Morse, the rest of Rhodes’s book gives enough context that a full reproduction of the original document might have stood in the poem’s place, almost as a ready-made, and still the words resonate as reframed evidence of the state’s instrumental use of language. Also like Morse, Rhodes does not erase to compose an “original,” personally expressive lyric from the text, but rather to clear space so as to listen to what the source text already speaks sotto voce:
In you the / Act will numb / the vision // If you are / you were never / required.23
The cruel tone mined from the form’s instructions betrays the dehumanizing aims behind the formal frame. Rhodes’s erasure also performs a kind of levelling of the different registers of the document, bringing many voices onto the same plane: the voice of the instructions, the declarative passages of the oath, the language identifying the fillable spaces, and the notary’s jurat (which insists, “he/she appeared to understand it, and made his/her mark hereto in our presences as a foresaid.”24 The effect is a heightened awareness of the instrumentality of the legal document, of the phenomenal horror of the form’s material existence.
At end of the form/poem, Rhodes leaves unwhited the space reserved for the physical mark of the person meant to make “his/her mark hereto in our presences.” Whereas in the rest of the poem, Rhodes frames off language with white space, here he frames a space in the original form where the form acknowledges the unlikelihood that the applicant can read the form. Rhodes puts space and text into the same register of visibility and obliquely interpolates the reader as an illiterate applicant. When the reader realizes that her position, facing the form, is potentially as an illiterate person, all the visible text in “Wite Out” becomes the colonized subject’s “illegible” text—present, but nevertheless signifying the very image of lethal white noise, of babble, of nonsense, the senselessness that produces the erasure of a subject. By playing with the white space in an Indian Act registration document, “Wite Out” frames the fields of that document as the cleared, bordered spaces within which the state manages the bodies and testimonies of Indigenous peoples.
In The Place of Scraps, Jordan Abel simultaneously engages the metaphors of framing and carving. He suggests that his task as writer is not so much about being spontaneously generative of language as about attending to the materiality of language, with hand and eye guided by Nisga’a tradition. “An account / or / summary / was to be / carver d [sic]/ from Alaska,” he writes.25 Using some of the most consequential texts by white anthropologists who have meaningfully documented, but have also misrepresented and misinterpreted, the cultures of northern, West Coast First Nations, Abel uses erasure to create literal layers of meaning. Abel places one erasure, then another, on pages immediately following passages of source text, such that the reader experiences the pages as mimicking the paper-on-paper materiality of tracings, of flip-book sequences.
In the original prose passages, Abel situates his speaker as “the poet [given] a wooden spoon that his absent father carved”26—a poet in the process of “reassess[ing] the validity of his knowledge of the past.”27 The speaker is a Vancouver-born descendant of the Nisga’a, the people of the upper Nass River. Like the totem pole whose removal and transport to Toronto is recounted by Marius Barbeau in Abel’s source texts, the speaker has been moved East by cultural forces, and thus he “cannot define the [totem pole carving] tradition his father functions within.”28 The lyric speaker is not always the voice with the most direct access to accounts of Nisga’a tradition. For example, the most detailed description of Nisga’a sons and nephews erecting totem poles in their fathers’ and uncles’ memory is reproduced in Barbeau’s text. Abel’s word-carvings are a kind of father-honouring that involves scraping from blocks of others’ language a “naked spectacle”29 of “this story … a secret / I have been inside of.”30 His word-carvings play with the irony of his access to Nisga’a tradition being mediated through colonizers’ texts.
If we were to imagine a spectrum where erasure conceived as pure, apolitical play is at one end, and erasure conceived as a formal grappling with the material politics of meaning-making is at the other, then we might put Austin Kleon’s Newspaper Blackout near that far first end. I would place Morse’s and Rhodes’s works at the other end, but not quite as close to the spectrum’s extreme end as I would place Abel. Morse and Rhodes each enact a kind of clearing away of extraneous text to create a space of accountability and transparency around the state’s language instruments. Like Morse and Rhodes, Abel highlights the instrumentality of anthropological accounts (“remove / thousands of / Indians / successfully / without feeling a tremor”).31 But by creating an analogy between pole carving and erasure poetry, Abel also subtly critiques conceptualist poets’ attitudes toward “resource” material.
In one original passage, Abel imagines Barbeau’s private thoughts when Barton, Barbeau’s guide, takes Barbeau to the poleless “place of scalps.” The name of this place is a proxy for Gingolx of the Nass River Valley: “the place of skulls / the place of scalps”. Barton has Barbeau hold out his hands to receive a fistful of dirt. “I knew then … that this was a sacred ritual, that I must remember each detail so the world could know it, too,” says Barbeau.32 Abel’s imagined Barbeau speaks with a personal attitude of entitlement representative of the broad assumptions of entitlement driving both British-led anthropological modernism and primitivist modernisms of the early-twentieth-century avant-garde. The white anthropologist assumes that his individual knowledge is productive of the world’s knowledge, that his “finding out” is the frontier of discovery, and that his interpretation of a First Nations person’s actions is naturally more informative than what is or isn’t said by the Indigenous actor. Abel depicts a writer-anthropologist distancing himself from a human-to-human act of communication and objectifying that communiqué into the raw material for his interpretation. The critique of modernist anthropology implicit in Abel’s work also functions as a critique of the broad assumptions of entitlement underlying many contemporary practices of found poetry.
Abel then erases, or carves off, portions of Barbeau’s flawed first-person account. Abel also “frames” the erased text with unattributed, possibly doctored, or even fictitious, passages from cultural anthropological texts—passages that may or may not be from the sources listed at the end of the book. The framing text is indistinguishable from remaining fragments of first-person accounts, such that a new frame emerges, and in its centre is nothing but a space, incompletely enclosed by a pair of quotation marks. The new frame entrenches Barton not as an interlocutor nor as a gesturer, but as a “mere … savage,” and Barbeau insists that “efforts … must / elude / Indian / element.”33 Abel’s poetic practice, then, mirrors Barbeau’s attitude toward Barton’s communication: Abel distances himself from the anthropologists’ communication by selectively quoting from the full text and by using these quotes as raw material for his own representation and authorial prestige. He inverts the roles of finder and “found” by looking with a Nisga’a gaze upon the anthropologist; he casts doubt on the legitimacy of early-twentieth-century anthropological accounts of First Nations people; and he indicts modernist practice for erasing evidence of its own collaboration with non-European interlocutors.
Finally, in another poem, Abel erases a passage by Barbeau—a passage describing the features of a totem pole that glosses some Nisga’a language. Abel first creates an aerated page with only a scattering of the Nisga’a words in brackets. Then he creates a page on which nothing appears except the empty brackets. Eventually, on the next page, new words appear in the brackets, and finally the last page of the series “resolves” into a fictive, lyric paragraph in which Barbeau presumes to interpret “his informant’s” gestures.34 Whereas a poet like Ronald Johnson conceives of his process in Radi Os as “composing the holes” in Milton’s text, “improving” it by excision,35 his relationship to predecessors thereby betraying an anxiety of influence, Abel creates holes and spaces in his source material, aiming to reestablish firm lines of influence and filiation. By positioning himself as Nisga’a carver, Abel suggests a relationship to source material that is not about exceeding or repurposing what has come before, but about receiving what is passed down.
Abel’s empty brackets, the “holes” or “blanks,” which he creates within multiple printings of texts,36 and the literal frames of language, made to surround either white space or other language, all make negative spaces in and around these texts. Modelling himself after the Nisga’a carver who creates negative spaces by removing wooden material, Abel carves word-material, and by doing so he reaffirms and refashions his cultural context as one in which the Nisga’a carve out their own cultural space. Place of Scraps affirms that cultural context and the work made within it are inseparable: that culture and tradition are material work made by bodies in place. Abel’s book demonstrates the power of language to frame even blankness, asserting that even emptinesses signify differently depending on cultural context. According to Abel, the writer has the power to create blankness, to create spaces of unknowing bordered by the chatter of competing narrative claims. Abel demonstrates that not only are acts of erasure achieved by suppressing or censoring the texts and voices of a culture, but that such erasure still occurs when these voices are objectified and circulated through appropriated and commodified representations, all of which serve the appropriator.
“When I started to work on Zong! I didn’t conceive of erasure as a technique,” writes M. NourbeSe Philip. Rather, she says she was “confronted by the two-page report of the case Gregson v. Gilbert, that dispassionately references the massacre of some two hundred enslaved Africans on board the eponymous slave ship Zong in 1781.”37 A lawyer herself, familiar with the tone and instrumentality of legal documents, Philip sees the text of the decision as a dehumanizing example of “how a case’s progress through the courts work[s] to squeeze all extraneous material including emotion and context from an event until you arriv[e] at a desiccated principle of law.”38 She feels compelled to respond, somehow, to the evidence before her of language having “promulgated the non-being of African peoples.”39 For Philip, it is not only legal language that is deeply implicated in this promulgation, but the English language itself that aids and abets this non-being. Philip’s challenge, then, is to find a way to mourn the drowned while working with the language that is accomplice to their murder. Philip decides to “not-tell the story that must be told.”40 Philip has turned to erasure in order to do this “not-telling.”
Philip calls the “appallingly abbreviated” Gregson v. Gilbert report “an inherently erased document” not only for its reductive, fact-stating, and synopsizing logic, but also for the unspeakability of how easily it places the humanity of Africans beside the point. Trying to “break the spell [that] the completed text has on us,” Philip turns to physical manipulations that eventually make her decide to “rearrange the words as they appeared in the text to fashion the poems … as if I had locked myself in the hold of the ship with the ‘cargo’ of bodies, words and memories—all erased by time, by history—the better to find the story that couldn’t ever be told, yet had to be told.”41 At first, Philip’s strategy of “using words exactly as they appeared in the case report,” to create the first movement of Zong!, is a process quite similar to the ones used by Morse and Rhodes. That approach gives way to a more fragmentary, more recombinant, strategy that has “less to do with subtraction and more to do with shattering the words of the text into spore words … The ‘erasure’ process [was one of] application and not subtraction.”42 Zong!’s preoccupation with socio-historical erasure of African histories is visually signified in the last of the book’s movements, where text appears only in light grey, and where words overlap each other and obscure one another. Philip comments:
I would argue that erasure is intrinsic to colonial and imperial projects. It’s an erasure that continues up to the present…. In my own case I didn’t have a lengthy document to work with. In an odd and interesting way, though, you could say that what I was doing was attempting to erase the layers of erasure to get to that ghostly palimpsest to which I could then apply techniques of erasure, if that doesn’t sound too confusing.… There is a sense in which Zong! continues a ‘lineage’ of erasure.43
The “ghostly palimpsest” that Philip envisions is the event of the massacre. The “original text” is the sum of the bodily events and lingual events of the ship’s journey—events that constitute the “evidence” for both the personhood and the humanity of the ship’s occupants, now effectively erased by the language of the decision in the case of Gregson v. Gilbert. To apply techniques of erasure to try to recover this ghostly palimpsest, to “erase erasure,” becomes the process of hearing words, phrases, dialogues from the imagined, haunting cacaphony of words, spoken by hundreds of people who have lived this historical, colonial event, “finding” them in the text of the document.
Like a litany, like a chant, in the notes that follow the poems of Zong!, Philip repeats her aim, in variations of the phrase “to not-tell the story that must be told.”44 The final sentence of the book tells us: “Zong! is the Song of the untold story; it cannot be told yet must be told, but only through its un-telling.”45 Philip explains that the drive was “to move beyond representation of what the New World experience was … for that would have meant working entirely within the order of logic, rationality and predictability; it would have meant ordering an experience which was disordered (and cannot ever be ordered).”46 Even grammar itself is implicated in this system of ordering disorder that should not be ordered; Philip is left to try to find ways to speak without reproducing the orders of the New World language that have erased African being. Lyric poetry is one of these orders; the law is another.
In her reading of Zong!, Sarah Dowling explains how in literary discourse an intelligible lyric voice constitutes evidence of personhood and authority. Dowling identifies Philip’s formal challenge in her poetry as analogous to the historiographer’s problem of how to represent legal non-persons.47 As Philip fragments words into “non-sense,” the words break “into sound, return to their initial and originary phonic sound—grunts, plosives, labials.”48 For Philip, “this language of grunt and groan, of moan and stutter,”49 of “pure utterance,”50 is a language that she can use to “not-tell” the story for which conventional telling is grossly inappropriate. “Zong! emphasizes the enfleshed voice,” writes Dowling. Philip erases the intelligibility of the document until she arrives at a concept of poetic voice which “emphasizes corporeality rather than interiority [in part] because it refers to non-persons to whom such interiority was not considered applicable.”51
We can also read Philip’s erasures and breaks as her own attempts to speak outside the orders of New World language. Philip tries to dissociate her own authorial intention from the authoritative impulses of legal expression by erasing, breaking, crossing out, and murdering the bonds of association between lyric intelligibility and legal personhood. She writes, using terms borrowed from Philip Monk, of eventually “absolving [her]self of authorial intention”:
I came to understand that I had … entirely absolved myself of “authorial intention,” so much so that I asked the publishers to allow another name to accompany mine on the book. That generated some very interesting discussions regarding placement in libraries and whose name would be catalogued, the possibilities of confusion with more than one name and so on. They eventually went along with my request. Setaey Adamu Boateng is the other name on Zong! and represents the collective voice of the ancestors.52
For Philip, the desire to put one’s name on a work is at direct odds with the aims of her conceptual collaboration with the ancestors. Philip endeavours to break into the silence created by the decision document to “hear” the voices silenced there. To do so would be impossible without the work of the Europeans whose names appear on the document and without the Africans whose deaths gave rise to the document and whose names were yet never recorded in the source text. The African names reappear in the footnotes of the poem: co-authors simultaneously resurfaced into memory by appearing on Philip’s page, but still held in a space underneath (as though submerged by) the document’s fragmented text.
There is nothing not-said.
—Vanessa Place
“Not-telling” is an apt metaphor, I think, for the logic of all four poets I have discussed so far. Both Rhodes’s concept of “anti-poem” and Philip’s concept of “not-telling” signal writing that is self-reflective about the socio-material conditions of literary production and defiant about assuming the privilege to “tell” within them. The documents with which these writers work suggest that rhetorical persuasiveness is effective only between mutually acknowledged agents of power. Consider the sound logic of the Kwakwaka’wakw elders in Morse’s official correspondence; the mark of the unspeaking subject in Rhodes’s Indian Act; the explanations of the Nisga’a informant when presented to Abel’s Barbeau; or the protests of the African slaves in Philip’s Gregson v Gilbert. Neither these bodies’ rhetorical skills nor the defensibility of their moral positions can mean (i.e., be meaningfully heard, therefore be effectively persuasive or “mean” anything) in a context that simultaneously denies their ability to tell and constructs the legitimately “told” as an address to the centres of colonial state power. Still, these bodies, these subjects, leave traces on documents. For Morse, Rhodes, Abel, and Philip, erasure involves a literal repossession and deconstruction of the colonial order’s texts. Erasure is a tool available for a guerilla accounting of voice, memory and identity outside the “grasp” of the English language, beyond the colonial, narrative structures of the tellable. These writers, who focus intently on the not-said, might take issue with Vanessa Place’s statement.
“I white out and black out words (is there a difference?),” asks Philip.53 Her question immediately forces us to consider the difference between language visibly obstructed and the absence of language from the page. The absent language of the erasure poem is legible as “absent” only to the degree that the reader has a contextual awareness of what is missing. Each of the four poets discussed chooses the technique of white-out/deletion. Each goes to pains not only to indicate their source texts, but to represent them, either as antecedent, background, or addendum to the poetry (save Morse, who is also the only poet who denies an explicit, political impulse to his work). Rhodes sets his text over the grey image of the application form; Abel cites Barbeau in lengthy passages before setting to work to white-out those passages; Philip reproduces Gregson vs. Gilbert in its entirety. Philip also uses grey print and overlapping print in “Ebora,” the fifth movement of her book, to remind us visually that, for her, the source text (that is, the event and its traces, not the document) asserts a ghostly presence—not-dead, never entirely absent. The choices of these poets expose a potential ethics of citational, if not intellectual, transparency to be exercised at the heart of conceptual writing.
If blacking out words, as Travis MacDonald does in O Mission Repo, leaves, as it were, its alphabetic bodies under an undecipherable black bar on the page, thus focusing attention on the cover-up more than the victims of the crime, then whiting out words in a work to be reproduced in print or on a white, digital background effectively “disappears” them, even erasing the traces of their disappearance, creating absences visually undifferentiated from the rest of the page. In a black-out, the black bar is the scene of the crime; the white page is as stage or backdrop. In a white-out, the spaces haunted by the words now erased have no border around them; the white spaces of “absence” bleed into the space between lines and into the margin; the material page itself becomes a field of silent knowing, of non-speaking.
For these four poets, then, (who white-out, while conserving the memory of what has been erased), the white page is not mere backdrop. It is not an absolute, empty space which original language fills with knowledge, but a bounded zone; such poets activate our awareness of the page itself as a judicial space that legitimates the expressions that enter there. In the usual logic of the lyric poem, the material whiteness of the page has either not signified; has been imagined as the open, unraced, receptive mind of the reader; or has been theorized as the open field of energetic transfer. But in the erasures by Morse, Rhodes, Abel, and Philip, the white page also becomes visible as a discursive space in which relations of power play out. Their page is the page of visual poetry, where line-length, letter-shape and spatial orientation matter. But beyond that, for these poets, a white page is a “discursive forum” into which narratives, claims, attributions, and citations are either allowed or disallowed.
The difference between the white-out gesture and the black-out gesture on a source text is somewhat analogous to the marking and the non-marking of the racializing gaze on bodies. In white supremacist cultures, a gaze that “whites” a body makes its own gesture invisible; the gaze sees a body not as “Other” but as “not-Other.”54 In the same economy, “blacking” a body makes it hypervisible, “overbodied,” and its blackness blocks the legibility of its subjective expression. To white-out a character is to assert the supremacy of page-space in allowing or disallowing expression; to black-out a character is to exploit the vulnerability of its embodied materiality, to see the character as nothing but black body, nothing but black ink.
American lawyer and poet Vanessa Place uses appropriative strategies that have been critiqued as operating from a sense of unaccountability, one that is indifferent to the subject-positions of her various readers and that contrasts sharply with the sense of accounting that Abel, Philip, Morse, and Rhodes demonstrate. Nonetheless, when Place discusses American law as “a story-telling contest,” invoking Derrida’s concept of the author as “signatory of the text,” she proposes a Conceptualist understanding of authorship, one that locates final power over reception with those who establish the context for reading a source text. She articulates a way of understanding the stance of the erasing author to the page and to the source text. She insists that “what matters depends on who makes matter matter,”55 and this insistence remains surprisingly consistent with the relationality explored by Canadian and Indigenous writers pursuing decolonial writing strategies.
Place writes: “the signatory is not the source, for the signatory is the source of its reception.… The witness is the source, the law is the signatory.”56 In the adversarial court-space that she imagines, the locus of power does not reside with the testimony-giving, raw-material-providing witness, but resides with the recognized authority of the person who commits the testimony to the white paper and takes credit for it. Place says: “I am an author not by virtue of having written anything, but by virtue of th[e] law’s recognition of me as signatory.”57
The only difference between Place’s approach to exposing the construction of authorial power and that of these poets who also exercise their powers of appropriation and redaction, is the angle from which they understand “poetry” and “the law” to be different contexts for their books. Place is a lawyer who brings a legal brief into the context of poetry so as to turn it into a “non-brief”; in one sense, she is moving a language of instrumentality into a particular space of aesthetics, one that stakes its claim on the value of absolute non-instrumentality. But if a writer does not differentiate so much between poetry and the law, and if a writer sees both poetic language and legal language as instrumental within the colonial context, then reframing a sourced text, or erasing a sourced text, does not generate conceptual energy only from turning an instrument of enforcement into an object of aesthetic reverberation. Morse, Rhodes, Abel, and Philip—and even Place—all see the language of poetry as potentially “enforcing,” just like other disciplinary discourses. These poets create aesthetic objects by appropriating “outsider” texts into the disciplinary frame of poetry; but they also work as agents within the larger colonial context, by making transparent the ethical demands made on their own power positions, on the ur-poets who wield aesthetic, if not judicial, power.
Place and the aforementioned Canadian poets and Indigenous poets work not only as insiders to processes of lyric expressivity, going “outside” that discourse to make use of the found, but as insiders to the discursive space and norms of colonialism. Through acts of poetry, these poets perform roles as culture-makers, whistle-blowers, and law-watchdogs. Through these acts of poetry they position themselves “above the law”—not to make a point about art’s moral non-investments in relation to the law, but as meta-legislators, witness to the law’s language procedures.
The Flarf and Conceptualist movements, led in the US by Kenneth Goldsmith (and now Vanessa Place), advance a rhetoric of the found that takes, as a given, our access to masses of digital information. The contextual paradigm of Flarf and Conceptualism has emphasized the overwhelming ease with which volumes of text, volumes heretofore beyond the scale of the book or individual writer, can now be searched and “found,” thanks to digital technologies. Erasure poetry in the American context has not rigorously critiqued the assumptions of technological literacy, access, and entitlement in this rhetoric.
But recently when Goldsmith publicly read, as his own found poem, an edited version of Michael Brown’s autopsy report, the response of numerous critics indicated that Goldsmith had reached, indeed breached, the ethical limits of “uncreative” sourcing. “Conceptualism’s relationship to ‘found’ text cannot be divorced from the colonial impulse to claim and maim,” writes Joey de Jesus, in response to Goldsmith’s performance. “Conceptualism creates yet another safe space for the ongoing appropriation, erasure and plagiarism of queer and/or non-white expression—in this case blackness.”58
Perhaps now that critiques of the found strategies at the heart of Conceptualism (by American writers of colour like Joey de Jesus, Ken Chen, and Cathy Park Hong) have grabbed the spotlight, the American poetics of erasure might take up more explicit, vigorous interventions into the cultural politics of the found. For now, such discussions in the American context still involve a Black-White, post-slavery racial discourse that, at least in mainstream media and in critical discussion, eclipses discussions of American colonial relations with Indigenous peoples.
The Canadian context, by contrast, has in the past decade seen its race and identity politics shift away from a white-authored multiculturalism that congratulates itself for its embrace of the non-white “new immigrant,” pivoting toward an unprecedented visibility of Indigenous people and their concerns in Canadian public discourse. Canadian mainstream media has been compelled to give sustained attention to the resistance movements of First Nations: disputes over proposed projects for pipelines of oil and gas in traditional territories, historic land-rights decisions on the West Coast, and the public findings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. In the aftermath of the deaths of Black Americans, like Eric Garner and Michael Brown, at the hands of police, critics went so far as to argue that Canada’s analog for the charged Black-White racial tensions in the United States lies in our current climate of race relations between Aboriginals and non-Aboriginals.59 Increasingly, and however begrudgingly, the Canadian popular consciousness has had to engage with voices that represent the Canadian police as state-sanctioned agents of violence against Indigenous people—voices that recount the founding of the Canadian state as a story of appropriation of land and resources.
Rhodes writes that recent works of Canadian found poetry are “much more interested in dissent” than earlier modernist, Canadian found poetry. Rhodes reads both Morse and Philip as thinkers “taken with post-colonial concerns,” thinkers who expose “the ridiculousness and offensiveness of previous narrative structures” by deploying the same strategies of control and selection “against them.”60 These writers are also more interested in dissent than their American counterparts. Although Jordan Abel’s work shows clear filiation with Goldsmith’s Gertrude Stein on Punctuation, such work also forces us to face the legacy of cultural appropriation at work in modernist practice. Even Canadian poets who use erasure without openly engaging the colonial contexts of avant-garde practice are sensitive to the obvious commodification in the ethos of the motto: “steal like an artist.” Gregory Betts’s “plunderverse,” for example, is a composition method involving erasure and recombining. Betts insists that plunderverse “is not a conventional ‘theft’ of another artist’s work—it is an acknowledgement of the economy in which we artists work, signalling and acknowledging previous artists that have been influential and, yet, at the same time, participating in the creative economy.”61
“I feel most coloured when I am thrown against a sharp white background,” reads an untitled 1990 painting by Glenn Ligon at the Whitney Museum. Ligon uses black oil-stick to stencil letters on a white wooden door, and stencils the same phrase over and over down the length of the door, in horizontal, wrapped lines that become increasingly blurred and illegible closer to the bottom of the painting. The phrase comes from Zora Neale Hurston’s essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me.” An image of the painting is reproduced in Claudia Rankine’s recent Citizen: An American Lyric. For many writers, as I’ve shown above, the literary page is a “sharp white background”: a platform for the voice of privilege, an acquiescent backdrop that silently supports the performance of Eurocentric consciousness. Vanessa Place uses the language of another African-American painter, Kara Walker, when Place writes that she embodies “the perpetrator, historically and currently.”62 That is, Place cribs language from “A Proposition by Kara Walker” to describe “how it feels to be with her.” Walker proposes: “The object of the painting is the subjugated Body. The Painter is the colonizing entity.”63
Rhodes, Abel, and Philip also echo Walker’s thinking when they each, in their own way, conceptualize the poet sitting like the colonizing, editorializing and legislating authority in relation to the material page. But in the essay that Place alludes to, Walker says: “The nigger is akin to the painter’s canvas / an inert, ahistorical, expedient lie … Made to be a receptacle for Hubris.… The Painter creates the canvas over which ideals of dominance are drawn.”64 If, for Place, the Poet is analogous to Walker’s painter, then her page, too, must also be analogous to Walker’s Nigger: a receptacle for Hubris … a space over which ideals of dominance are written.
In readings of “White Out of Gone With The Wind by Vanessa Place,” Place stands in silence, flipping the page, looking occasionally at the audience, and ends by reading the last, iconic line of the source text. Place calls the performance an erasure. “The silence, then, is ambiguous,” writes Jacob Edmond. “It could mark Place’s attack by deletion on Gone with the Wind’s racist ideology, or it could be a performance of that racist ideology’s stifling of other voices.”65 What is unambiguous is that in such a performance Vanessa Place is the embodied orchestrator of that silence, staged within the spatio-temporal expectations of the poetry reading. By calling the piece a “white-out,” she too associates “whiting” with the exercise of that silencing control.
When the discussed poets who write on the territories called Canada excise text in print, they bring their readers into the terrain of the visual, of the non-linguistic, doing so to demonstrate the stakes of silencing control. These Indigenous poets and Canadian poets also remind readers that a backdrop is not a neutral place, not an idealized silence upon which text sounds. The poets draw readers into an experience of the page as a subjugated white material upon which dominance plays itself out in language and documents its point of view. Place works with the same terrain: ostensibly reminding her listeners/readers that when she claims authorship, she takes charge of the silences as much as what is voiced. But Place could have whited out any text to assert this dominance, and she could have disseminated the intellectual property of any “notoriously litigious”66 estate to try to provoke a lawsuit to raise questions about ownership of intellectual property. But Place seems to want to work with racist representations specifically. By choosing to re-voice the racism of a source text that she has chosen specifically for its racism, Place attempts to use avant-garde literary practices of framing and voicing to expose the racializing cruelty, indeed criminality, beyond the law—a cruelty regularly enacted as silence and that drives the power dynamics of American race relations. She calls her work a “necessary cruelty.” But necessary for whom? Necessary to whom?
Sara Ahmed has written: “It has become commonplace for whiteness to be represented as invisible, as the unseen or the unmarked, as non-colour, the absent presence or hidden referent, against which all other colours are measured as forms of deviance.”67 “But to whom is whiteness invisible?” asks George Yancy. “Whiteness is invisible to those who inhabit it, to those who have come to see whiteness and what it means to be human as isomorphic.”68 Ahmed and Yancy suggest that we write and live in an economy of signification in which normalized white identity experiences itself only as non-transparent, as whitely coloured (rather than unmarked, transparent, universal) when examined alongside non-whiteness. Place’s work can be understood, then, as white identity trying to make its own invisibility visible—to itself. As Aaron Kunin has noted, Place’s ideas about white identity aren’t so different from those of her detractors, but it seems Place is unaware that what she is saying isn’t news.69 Place’s insistence on her cruelty as “necessary” makes sense only if one assumes this cruelty as an invisible or silenced part of one’s own identity in the first place. Ironically, in order to experience the big reveal of Place’s work as a significant unmasking, one has to be unaware of so much writing already out there. But as Crispin Sartwell writes, “One of the major strategies for preserving white invisibility to ourselves is the silencing, segregation, or delegitimation of voices that speak about whiteness from a non-white location.”70
When Place argues that a white body “serves as both the defense against the State and as its emblem,”71 she isn’t saying anything that Morse, Rhodes, Abel, and Philip, haven’t already explored with more aesthetic nuance in their own work. Place does not posit, as Kara Walker does, or as Jordan Abel does, that a person can consciously and critically take up a position of “authority over form, content, and interpretation” without having to presume that authority arises only out of one’s racialized subject position. Philip is not sure that she can take up an authoritative position without assuming a privilege constructed on a history of cruelties, but unlike Place, Philip goes to great pains to try to “absolve” herself of authorial intention.
The erasurists writing in territories called Canada reproduce the cruel language of government officials, anthropologists, and lawyers without raising legitimate concerns about whether or not they are simply reiterating hate speech, because these erasurists build contexts of anti-oppression around their erasures. Morse’s erasure is set within a polyvocal history of the Kwakwaka’wakw—a history that is a recognizable inheritor of Black Mountain aesthetics. Rhodes frames his work in X as “The Heart of Whiteness [that] terries in Indian territory,”72 that specifically criticizes the aesthetics of a Canadian Confederation poet and the CanLit machinery that has idealized him. Abel uses Nisga’a pole-carving as the analogy for his stripping of citations down to graphic marks on the page before building new lyric poems upon their foundations. Philip adds a lengthy “Notanda” to her work so as to flag the conceptual conundrum that she negotiates when inhabiting the position of authorship while attempting to break apart racist language.
These poets effectively “activate” the reader’s awareness of the white page as a silence that is a “receptacle for [a master’s] Hubris … and [a space] over which ideals of dominance are written,” but these poets also make clear that they do not presume to address predominantly white audiences, for whom it is “necessary” to be compelled into experiencing their own silence as complicit with systematic racism. These poets, who each come to their practice of erasure technique through poetics specific to each individual's relation to place and community, compel their readers to experience the page as a constructed silence subject to the whim of authors who embody, intersectionally, signatory power and racializing practice in the same writing hand. They address a diverse audience who may or may not already understand the presumption of objectivity and authority involved in the performance of whiteness. By practising erasure as a performance of representational power, these writers insist that all authors, always, are participating in the politics of what is represented and what is silenced.
The epigraph for “The Canadian Context of Erasure” is from Vanessa Place, “The Case for Conceptualism,” writing.upenn.edu/epc/authors/place/Place_Conceptualcase1A.pdf.
1 Andrew David King, “Effaced Ballads: An Interview with Matthew Rohrer, Anthony McCann, and Joshua Beckman on Erasing the Romantics,” Kenyon Review (30 November 2012).
2 Andrew David King, “The Weight of What’s Left Out: Six Contemporary Erasurists on Their Craft,” Kenyon Review (6 November 2012).
3 King, “The Weight.”
4 King, “The Weight.”
5 King, “The Weight.”
6 King, “The Weight.”
7 Andrew David King, “Theft as Art, Art as Theft: An Interview with Austin Kleon,” Kenyon Review (26 August 2012).
8 King, “The Weight.”
9 Lorraine Weir, “Discovery Passages,” Canadian Literature 214 (Autumn 2012), 179.
10 Craig Dworkin, Reading the Illegible (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), 3.
11 Dworkin, Reading, 4–5.
12 Smaro Kamboureli, On the Edge of Genre (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 102. The italics for act are added.
13 Ken Norris, “Ken Norris and Garry Thomas Morse Discuss After Jack,” Talonbooks (23 July 2010).
14 Shane Rhodes, “Reuse and Recycle: Finding Poetry in Canada,” Arc Magazine (1 May 2013).
15 Gary Thomas Morse, Discovery Passages (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2011), 49.
16 Christopher Bracken, The Potlatch Papers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), back cover.
17 Kevin Spenst, “Garry Thomas Morse,” kevinspenst.com (24 June 2011).
18 Norris, “Ken Norris.”
19 Spenst, “Garry.”
20 Spenst, “Garry.”
21 Shane Rhodes, “Shane Rhodes—X: Poems and Anti-Poems (An Interview),” Toronto Quarterly (19 September 2013).
22 Rhodes, “Shane Rhodes.”
23 Shane Rhodes, X: Poems and Anti-Poems (Gibsons: Nightwood, 2013), 74.
24 Rhodes, X, 79.
25 Jordan Abel, The Place of Scraps (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2013), 11.
26 Abel, The Place of Scraps, 97.
27 Abel, 105.
28 Abel, 139.
29 Abel, 105.
30 Abel, 179.
31 Abel, 25.
32 Abel, 163.
33 Abel, 173.
34 Abel, 47–55.
35 Ross Hair, Ronald Johnson’s Modernist Collage Poetry (New York: Palgrave, 2010), 133.
36 Abel, The Place, 27.
37 King, “The Weight.” The italics for confronted are added.
38 King, “The Weight.”
39 M. NourbeSe Philip. Zong! (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 197.
40 Philip, Zong!, 189.
41 King, “The Weight.”
42 King, “The Weight.”
43 King, “The Weight.”
44 Philip, Zong!, 189–91, 193–201, 204, 206–207.
45 Philip, 207.
46 Philip, 197.
47 Sarah Dowling, “Persons and Voices: Sounding Impossible Bodies in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!,” Canadian Literature 210/211 (Autumn 2011): 44.
48 Philip, Zong!, 205.
49 Philip, 205
50 Philip, 207.
51 Dowling, “Persons and Voices,” 54.
52 King, “The Weight.”
53 Philip, Zong!, 193.
54 Rebecca Aanerud, “Fictions of Whiteness: Speaking the Names of Whiteness in US Literature,” Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 37.
55 Vanessa Place, “The Case for Conceptualism,” Electronic Poetry Center, 7.
56 Place, “The Case,” 8.
57 Place, 8.
58 Joey De Jesus, “Goldsmith, Conceptualism and the Half-baked Rationalization of White Idiocy,” Apogee (18 March 2015).
59 “Michael Brown, Eric Garner Deaths ‘Echo’ Aboriginal Experience in Canada,” cbc.ca (8 January 2015).
60 Rhodes, “Reuse.”
61 Gregory Betts, “From Wit to Plunder in a Time of War,” The Poetic Front 3 (2010).
62 Vanessa Place, “Artist’s Statement: Gone With The Wind @Vanessa Place,” genius.com (19 May 2015).
63 Kara Walker, “Manuscript for,” Rethinking Contemporary Art and Multicultural Education, ed. Eungie Joo and Joseph Keehn II (New York: Routledge, 2011), 36.
64 Walker, “Manuscript,” 38.
65 Jacob Edmond, “On Not Repeating ‘Gone With the Wind’: Iteration and Copyright,” Jacket2 (17 December 2012).
66 Place, “Artist’s Statement.”
67 Sara Ahmed, “Declarations of Whiteness: The Non-performativity of Antiracism,” Borderlands 3.2 (2004).
68 George Yancy, Look, A White! Philosophical Essays on Whiteness (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012), 7.
69 Aaron Kunin, “Would Vanessa Place Be a Better Poet If She Had Better Opinions?,” nonsite.org (26 September 2015).
70 Crispin Sartwell, Act Like You Know: African-American Autobiography and White Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 9.
71 Place, “Artist’s Statement.”
72 Rhodes, X, 3.