Judge's Note
Writing is a responsive practice, indebted to other voices. Erasure, collage, and blackout poetry acknowledge and play with this fact. Pressing on what came before, in these forms we consider the ways our speech emerges from received terms.
In reading these poems, I like to think about the objectives and implications of altering each source text. To quote Robin Coste Lewis’s talk “The Race Within Erasure,” intervention may “magnify the original writer’s intent,” as in “Ricky,” which condenses a story of desire: “the love of a man / goddamn.” Erasure may also (Lewis again) “reveal more about the project of both writers simultaneously.” For instance, “Out of Luck” blots out a radio piece on the eclipse to place in sharper relief the economic spectacle of cities in the path of totality: “on Monday, / find / a silhouette / Cleveland / was selling.” In “An Editor’s Face, Eclipsed,” sourced from the memoirs of editor Mabel Loomis Todd, the text is cut out and visually rearranged, eliding even its elisions, a move that meditates, via imitation, upon Todd’s own silent editing of Emily Dickinson.
Intervention in the given can also create new worlds, as in the marvelously distorted images of “Lake Erie”: “water / in the sun.” Or in “Balfour,” which alters the 1917 declaration to declare sympathy for Palestine, the only state mentioned in this version. “Here” transforms a comforting hot dish recipe into a paean of spring’s emergence (I like to think that the speaker might be a flower or earthworm rooting through the underground casserole).
Erasure forms acknowledge their materiality. We see the original page (the palimpsest) in many of these poems, as in the Vanity Fair spread of “Breakup.” Collage further amplifies this visual meaning-making. In “Towering Cathedrals,” words are cloistered in Costume Cavalcade’s structured skirts, like the women pictured there.
The marks one makes to lift a new version from the page also participate in meaning: what’s obliterated, what’s retained? The trace of the hand comes through like delicate rays of light in “Eclipse.” In “Tidal Song: a Dirge for Earth,” the writer’s line by line click and drag is preserved in the redaction bars’ jagged strata. By contrast, the clean lines of “A Corpse Husband Blackout Poem That My Grandmother Can Read” play on the cleaned-up lyrics. Redaction, a tool now omnipresent in pdf apps, also connects back to a government’s tools of control: I think of Solmaz Sharif’s writing on censorship, a blunt and brutal instrument, in “The Near-Transitive Properties of the Political and the Poetical: Erasure.” (I hope this essay is soon back online; in the meantime, Muriel Leung’s “Erasure in Three Acts” summons its spirit.) In “Here We Are: Transcript of Palestinians Bombed With Lights Flickering,” the redactions connect back to the rolling energy (and thus communication) blackouts that Israel has used in its war against the Palestinian people.
A few words on the poems I selected:
SECOND RUNNER-UP: “Los Angeles Disappeared”
In this poem — a collage of Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards, a map of the Los Angeles freeway system, and what I would guess is a credit card pamphlet — disappearance occurs in layers. Words are circled and connected by the thin line of a black pen, which steers our reading and visually echoes the map’s neighborhood-splitting freeways. Above this layer, translucent white lines obscure non-preselected text (or most of it), white lines reminiscent of a roadway’s solid white line (stay in your lane) and the city’s patterns (like many others) of white flight and racist violence. The road connects “Impulse points” and ends in a mall, the desire for “a paradise confirmed.” In this poem, what is “redacted” must be “then expressed” — the shards remembered, reassembled.
FIRST RUNNER-UP: “Others Would Get Jealous”
The promotional copy for the source text, Remote: Office Not Required, states: “As an employer, restricting hiring to your local region means you’re not getting the best people you can. As an employee, restricting your job search to companies within a reasonable commute means you’re not working for the best company you can. Remote shows both employers and employees how they can work together, remotely, from any desk, in any space, in any place, anytime, anywhere.” Remote workers and contractors know that remote labor carries many conditions: greater competition and disposability, perpetual availability, fresh hells of surveillance, disintegration of benefits — and crucially, estrangement from other workers. By breaking up the sales pitch, sequestering words into their own offices, this writer critiques the forces that distract us from our collective power and shared “get.” The photocopy’s echo nods to the abandoned office and the worker’s threatened replacement, while the hand-drawn permanent marks warmly human this source, as do its inviting challenges to rework our positions: “Why shouldn’t we / scheme?”
WINNER: “Be Kind 2 Her”
“Be Kind 2 Her” visually assembles a home from pieces. There are shelves and stairs (perhaps cut from furniture catalogues), a domestic interior alongside contrastive exteriors (a city street, the marina). The home’s incisive lines contrast with the organic, torn edges of day and night sky above. Below, a ragged fire threatens the assembled room — and adds a pop of bright color, like the blue sky, red lamp, and green shelf that speed to my eye.
Anne Sexton’s poem “Her Kind” is the source of this poem, a fact we learn from the page itself — a noteworthy preservation. Sexton’s subjects included domestic subjugation; in her own homes, she was victim and perpetrator, abused and abuser. Her life was short and difficult. Undoubtedly there is more that could be said about this poem’s relationship to Sexton, who remains present in the poem. In Sexton’s poem, the titular “her” are women persecuted as witches; here, she might be poet, parent, child, nurturer, abuser, a “light woman,” the speaker’s own past person. Homophonically speaking, the writer follows the “roots.” To “be kind to her” is to be family or familiar.
This poem admits and transforms the past: “routes / where, / not ashamed, I have been.” A miraculous rearrangement, “night done light.” The poem itself becomes a shelf for “rearranging” the “misunderstood routes,” opening out dimensions of meaning — which is to say, the poem has reached a hard-won understanding and moves with great grace beyond it.
In reading these poems, I like to think about the objectives and implications of altering each source text. To quote Robin Coste Lewis’s talk “The Race Within Erasure,” intervention may “magnify the original writer’s intent,” as in “Ricky,” which condenses a story of desire: “the love of a man / goddamn.” Erasure may also (Lewis again) “reveal more about the project of both writers simultaneously.” For instance, “Out of Luck” blots out a radio piece on the eclipse to place in sharper relief the economic spectacle of cities in the path of totality: “on Monday, / find / a silhouette / Cleveland / was selling.” In “An Editor’s Face, Eclipsed,” sourced from the memoirs of editor Mabel Loomis Todd, the text is cut out and visually rearranged, eliding even its elisions, a move that meditates, via imitation, upon Todd’s own silent editing of Emily Dickinson.
Intervention in the given can also create new worlds, as in the marvelously distorted images of “Lake Erie”: “water / in the sun.” Or in “Balfour,” which alters the 1917 declaration to declare sympathy for Palestine, the only state mentioned in this version. “Here” transforms a comforting hot dish recipe into a paean of spring’s emergence (I like to think that the speaker might be a flower or earthworm rooting through the underground casserole).
Erasure forms acknowledge their materiality. We see the original page (the palimpsest) in many of these poems, as in the Vanity Fair spread of “Breakup.” Collage further amplifies this visual meaning-making. In “Towering Cathedrals,” words are cloistered in Costume Cavalcade’s structured skirts, like the women pictured there.
The marks one makes to lift a new version from the page also participate in meaning: what’s obliterated, what’s retained? The trace of the hand comes through like delicate rays of light in “Eclipse.” In “Tidal Song: a Dirge for Earth,” the writer’s line by line click and drag is preserved in the redaction bars’ jagged strata. By contrast, the clean lines of “A Corpse Husband Blackout Poem That My Grandmother Can Read” play on the cleaned-up lyrics. Redaction, a tool now omnipresent in pdf apps, also connects back to a government’s tools of control: I think of Solmaz Sharif’s writing on censorship, a blunt and brutal instrument, in “The Near-Transitive Properties of the Political and the Poetical: Erasure.” (I hope this essay is soon back online; in the meantime, Muriel Leung’s “Erasure in Three Acts” summons its spirit.) In “Here We Are: Transcript of Palestinians Bombed With Lights Flickering,” the redactions connect back to the rolling energy (and thus communication) blackouts that Israel has used in its war against the Palestinian people.
A few words on the poems I selected:
SECOND RUNNER-UP: “Los Angeles Disappeared”
In this poem — a collage of Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards, a map of the Los Angeles freeway system, and what I would guess is a credit card pamphlet — disappearance occurs in layers. Words are circled and connected by the thin line of a black pen, which steers our reading and visually echoes the map’s neighborhood-splitting freeways. Above this layer, translucent white lines obscure non-preselected text (or most of it), white lines reminiscent of a roadway’s solid white line (stay in your lane) and the city’s patterns (like many others) of white flight and racist violence. The road connects “Impulse points” and ends in a mall, the desire for “a paradise confirmed.” In this poem, what is “redacted” must be “then expressed” — the shards remembered, reassembled.
FIRST RUNNER-UP: “Others Would Get Jealous”
The promotional copy for the source text, Remote: Office Not Required, states: “As an employer, restricting hiring to your local region means you’re not getting the best people you can. As an employee, restricting your job search to companies within a reasonable commute means you’re not working for the best company you can. Remote shows both employers and employees how they can work together, remotely, from any desk, in any space, in any place, anytime, anywhere.” Remote workers and contractors know that remote labor carries many conditions: greater competition and disposability, perpetual availability, fresh hells of surveillance, disintegration of benefits — and crucially, estrangement from other workers. By breaking up the sales pitch, sequestering words into their own offices, this writer critiques the forces that distract us from our collective power and shared “get.” The photocopy’s echo nods to the abandoned office and the worker’s threatened replacement, while the hand-drawn permanent marks warmly human this source, as do its inviting challenges to rework our positions: “Why shouldn’t we / scheme?”
WINNER: “Be Kind 2 Her”
“Be Kind 2 Her” visually assembles a home from pieces. There are shelves and stairs (perhaps cut from furniture catalogues), a domestic interior alongside contrastive exteriors (a city street, the marina). The home’s incisive lines contrast with the organic, torn edges of day and night sky above. Below, a ragged fire threatens the assembled room — and adds a pop of bright color, like the blue sky, red lamp, and green shelf that speed to my eye.
Anne Sexton’s poem “Her Kind” is the source of this poem, a fact we learn from the page itself — a noteworthy preservation. Sexton’s subjects included domestic subjugation; in her own homes, she was victim and perpetrator, abused and abuser. Her life was short and difficult. Undoubtedly there is more that could be said about this poem’s relationship to Sexton, who remains present in the poem. In Sexton’s poem, the titular “her” are women persecuted as witches; here, she might be poet, parent, child, nurturer, abuser, a “light woman,” the speaker’s own past person. Homophonically speaking, the writer follows the “roots.” To “be kind to her” is to be family or familiar.
This poem admits and transforms the past: “routes / where, / not ashamed, I have been.” A miraculous rearrangement, “night done light.” The poem itself becomes a shelf for “rearranging” the “misunderstood routes,” opening out dimensions of meaning — which is to say, the poem has reached a hard-won understanding and moves with great grace beyond it.
Alyssa Perry's writing appears with Annulet, The Canary, Fence, River Styx, the Experimental Sound Studio, and elsewhere. She is an editor at Rescue Press and Cleveland Review of Books. Perry teaches at the Cleveland Institute of Art. Her book Oily Doily is forthcoming from Bench Editions in fall 2024.
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