Erasure
Poetry
Project

Project

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-CenturyUnited 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 erasurepoetry’s capacity not only to archive but also to question what archives (should and need to) entail.

Centering its attention on poetry’s commerce with the archives of U.S. empire and the documents they contain, W( )oles and ( )holes examines the crosscurrents between literature, history, and politics across such interdisciplinary humanities inquiries as American Studies today. I place particular theoretical emphasis in this project on textual disruption, inter-textual layering/crosscutting,and the audio-visually fragmented nature of erasure in terms of oral poetry readings (performance), in thinking of the archival through the poetic. The ensuing manuscript, based on a series of contextualized close readings (including close viewing and close listening practices) of poetry by Solmaz Sharif, Philip Metres, Layli Long Soldier, Nick Flynn, Mai Der Vang, and Travis McDonald, is envisioned to entail new insights into the ways erasure poetry 

(a) adopts literature as a means of textual subversion against and of othering those entities (mainly the empire and its agents) who have long occupied positions of power in the frame of empire; 

(b) raises awareness, more broadly, about the “documentary politics” at work in the complex cultures of misinformation, secrecy, and distrust that empires has been built on;

(c) sheds light on the complexities of empires as political systems that have sought to uphold themselves in and out of classified documents, distorted archival records, and heavily redacted, declassified files—a poetics that is constitutive of what Ann Laura Stoler identifies as “the current immediacies of empire” (4); and, above all, 

(d) needs to be studied as a means to re-map, reconceive, and intervene in established “archival memory” (Sharpe 466) at the nexus of “literary traditions, cultural archives, and official histories” (Dowdy 7), to re-imagine and re-order the archives of empire.

Works Cited

Dowdy, Michael. “Introduction.” In American Poets in the 21st Century: The Poetics of Social Engagement. Edited by Claudia Rankine and Michael Dowdy. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2018. 1-27.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2011.
Flynn, Nick. The Captain Asks for a Show of Hands: Poems. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2011.
Leong, Michael. Contested Records: The Turn to Documents in Contemporary North American Poetry. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2020.
Long Soldier, Layli. Whereas. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2017.
McDonald, Travis. The O Mission Repo. Fact-Simile Editions, 2008.
Metres, Philip. Sand Opera. Farmington: Alice James Books, 2015.
Sharif, Solmaz. Look: Poems. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2016.
Stoler, Ann Laura. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.
Vang, Mai Der. Yellow Rain: Poems. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2021.