Erasure
Poetry
Project
by Mahshid Mayar, PhD funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG)
A book-length study of a sub-genre of documentary poetry called “erasure poetry,” my Habilitation/second-book project, W( )oles and ( )holes: Politically Engaged Erasure Poetry in Twenty-First-Century United States, interrogates the ways the political pervades the poetic and the poetic manifests the political in twenty-first-century U.S. poetry. A twenty-first-century example of century-long practices in avant garde (experimental and conceptual) forms of poetry and fine arts that Kenneth Goldsmith (2011) identifies as practices in “managing language,” erasure poetry is an emerging conceptual poetic form that has textual, visual, and discursive roots in carefully selected, often (but not always) publicly available “source texts.” With analytical emphasis placed on the intersections of gender, race, religion, and coloniality, this book project builds on “the documental turn in North American poetry” (Michael Leong 5), critically examining erasure poetry’s capacity not only to archive but also to question what archives (should and need to) entail.