The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure by Solmaz Sharif
In the poetry craft group of which I am a part we read this essay by Solmaz Sharif for our meeting today:
https://thevolta.org/ewc28-ssharif-p1.html
The essay examines the political ramifications of using erasure as a technique. These are some questions I developed with quotes from the essay to guide our discussion:
What do you think of the syllogism with which Sharif begins?:
Every poem is an action.
Every action is political.
Every poem is political.
What are the political ramifications of this technique? What are our responsibilities to the text when we use this technique? What does it mean if a poet is not taking these ramifications into consideration? It would be helpful to take in Sharif’s statement about the political in this context:
“The political is not topical or thematic, it is tactical and formal. It is not, as its strictest definition supposes, something relegated to legislative halls, but something enacted wherever power is at hand, power being at hand wherever there is a relation, including the relation between text and reader.”
Are we enacting on the text the same process by which states forcefully extradict peoples, conduct trials without due process, oppression, genocide, and other acts of historical erasure? Is it or does it have the potential to be an act of violence? Sharif:
“the proliferation of erasure as a poetic tactic in the United States is happening alongside a proliferation of our awareness of it as a state tactic. And, it seems, many erasure projects today hold these things as unrelated.”
“Erasure may well be the closest poetry in English has gotten to role of the state.”
Under what circumstances, if any, do you think a poet should not use this technique when approaching a technique? Should we limit ourselves in this way? According to Sharif:
“To not attempt this conversation wastes the opportunity to create a cultural acumen that can inform political change. It wastes the danger—because poetry is, if we will it, a dangerous business in this republic.”
Sharif’s points for consideration:
Possible political and aesthetic objectives of poetic erasure as set forth by a multiplicity of sources:
Highlight via illegibility and silence an original erasure (e.g. Jen Bervin’s Dickinson Fasciles or Phil Metres’ Abu Ghraib Arias)
Collapse time and instance between dead and living (e.g. “The dead do not cease in the grave.” Srikanth Reddy, Voyager, p 3)
Expose author’s authority and, therefore, role as culpable participant (e.g. “…the very fact of mutilating the text broke the spell the complete text has on us. I use the word ‘mutilate’ with great deliberation here since I was dlieply aware at the time I worked on Zong! that the intent of the transatlantic slave trade was to mutilate—languages, cultures, people, communities and histories—in the effort of a great capitalist eliterprise. And I would argue that erasure is intrinsic to colonial and imperial forces. It’s an erasure that continues up to the present.” M. NourbeSe Philip)
Care for what is left behind so that erasure has an additive or highlighting effect (e.g. “my first encounter with the text as a potential palimpsest for erasure was reading the words “If it had no pencil, / Would it try mine – li—the first words attributed to Dickinson in 1861. I took a pencil and circled those words. In the next three poems I circled phrases: “a Flag”— “Victory”—”Martyrs”—”Streaks of Meteor – / Upon a Planet’s Blind” and realized that I could work with these beginning poems as erasures.” Janet Holmes)
Render incomplete a text to invite collaboration between reader and text (e.g. while not an intended erasure, If Not Winter, Sappho’s fragments, Anne Carson trans.)
Point to the nearly infinite possibilities and infinite centers of a single text (e.g. any appropriation)
Here are links to some of the projects/artists Sharif mentions, or reviews/interviews about them:
https://www.jenbervin.com/about
And in my opinion the most beautiful presentation yet of some of Dickinson's letters, The Gorgeous Nothings, on which Bervin collaborated:
https://www.jenbervin.com/projects/the-gorgeous-nothings-edition
https://josephrossnet.wordpress.com/2012/01/07/phil-metres-abu-ghraib-arias/
https://www.harvardreview.org/book-review/voyager/
https://kenyonreview.org/2012/11/erasure-collaborative-interview/
https://www.google.com/books/edition/If_Not_Winter/0FiIB9vI2cMC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover
Carson's translations of Sappho, which I believe I have mentioned before, is one of my favorite books of poems. If you click on the last link above and scroll down to page 2 and later you will get a sense of what Sharif is referring to.