A further word on erasures (for those who followed the rabbit holes of yesterday’s post). Wave Books has a page dedicated to erasure poetry production, replete with the equivalent of a virtual refrigerator for hanging them up once completed. Beware your free time.
Tom Phillips may have written the book (or erased it?) on these airy lyrics. A Humument first appeared in print form in 1970, having been made out of the raw stock of W.H. Mallock’s A Human Document (originally published in 1892). A Humument is a real sphinx of a thing–half book arts, half hints of poetry–and makes it new in a way that probably never occurred to Pound. Particularly lovely are pages 79, 170 (with the startlingly pertinent “o / if I had / your voice”, and 263.
All this talk of erasure is not without political import–it is a term often used to describe the legacy–if not the act–of colonialism. Interestingly, ‘erasure’ (the term) also appears often when searched for with the Patriot Act on the web. It will be interesting to see if we will come to write about the legacy of the Patriot Act with the term ‘erasure’ too; time will tell. Yet this much seems true: in so far as an idea can be defined by the words we use to talk about it, the shared language is certainly provoking.
O, if I had your voice.