December 12, 2012
The Lessons of Objects: An Interview with Mark Doty
More than anything, Mark Doty seems to me an investigator of objects—of the things and beings that clutter the world, the microcosms inside microcosms inside our macrocosm. In his work […]
November 30, 2012
Effaced Ballads: An Interview with Matthew Rohrer, Anthony McCann, and Joshua Beckman on Erasing the Romantics
KR: It makes sense to me why a group of contemporary poets with more avant-garde than conservative aesthetics (though I use those terms with some trepidation) would choose to erase […]
November 6, 2012
The Weight of What’s Left [Out]: Six Contemporary Erasurists on Their Craft
The choice to use erasure as a poetic technique is not, strictly speaking, a new one: in 1969, for instance, Marcel Broodthaers erased Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le […]
October 25, 2012
Politics, erasure, and a ‘sometimes genuine music’
The question I want to ask is whether or not the act of erasure produces another voice—if the process of effacing (or defacing, as such may be a more accurate […]
September 16, 2012
Stitching shut the holes: on concealed erasure
I began my last post with a discussion of the multiple valences the word “erasure” has when used to describe a poetic technique. But just as there are many different […]
September 7, 2012
‘Were there but world enough and time’: Tom Phillips on A Humument
If the un-canon exists—or the alternative canon; a trove of works treasured outside of the mainstream—then it indisputably includes Tom Phillips and A Humument, his capstone project. A painter by […]
June 11, 2012
A Humument: a lesson in un-reading (i)
(This post is the first segment in a series on Tom Phillips’s A Humument. The others—including an interview with Phillips—will appear later this month.) Though billed as “a treated Victorian […]