Blacking Out Evening Will Come 

The monthly journal of poetics, Evening Will Come, often focuses on different issues in poetics. For their 28th issue in April 2013, the journal focused specifically on erasure poetry and poetics. The eight essays in the issue have become some of the most widely cited in the small amount of academic work on erasure poetics, particularly Solmaz Sharif’s essay “The Near Transitive Properties of the Political and Poetical: Erasure.” In her Jacket2 essay series on erasure poetics, Jennifer Cheng even states, “If you read anything on the politics of poetical erasure, let it be this essay by Solmaz Sharif.”

However, because it is themed around “erasure,” this issue does not specifically touch on or even mention blackout poetry by name. As is common in most literature about blackout poetry, though, some of what is talked about in these essays is mislabeled as erasure poetry when it is actually talking about blackout poetry. Solmaz, for instance, mentions both erasure and blackout poems in her work. She also directly discusses blackout poems in comparing erasure poetry to government redaction because of how they cover the text in a way that looks like government files that have been redacted. Even though it contributes to the confusion surrounding the difference between blackout and erasure poetry, the issue is still important in the evolution of blackout poetry in academic spheres because it is one of the first major publications to really start investigating erasure and blackout poetry’s colonial roots. 

For instance, in his essay “from,” erasure poet Craig Santos Perez specifically draws a connection between erasure poetry and colonialism. He suggests that over the past century, Guam has been subjected to “American colonialism [that] has brought devastating erasure,” erasing everything from housing practices, family structures, cultural practices, and even native languages. This has caused him to write “from a continuous space of erasure” because he cannot escape the erasure this colonial destruction has inflicted upon him and his community. Yet, even within this constant and ever invasive erasure, Perez writes. Specifically, he writes erasure poetry because he considers that his poetry “exists as continuous presence against continuous erasure.” He is able to take the erasure that has so destroyed his world and use it to create poetry that tells the story of his people that the colonized world has attempted to erase. Sharif also briefly touches on erasure’s colonial connections. She likens the act of erasing and blacking out to the violence enacted upon people by colonizers, suggesting, “historically the striking out of text is the root of obliterating peoples.” This comparison is echoed in Cheng’s essay series in Jacket2 as well, which was published three years after this issue. 

This issue was the first to really explore the underlying implications of erasure poetry. In her introduction to the issue, Cristiana Baik remarks that “While reading through contributors’ pieces for this issue of Evening Will Come, erasure also became a violent gesture, a map of potential; intervention; an act of sifting; palimpsest.” This insight and transformation is important to the greater study of erasure and blackout poetry, as it engages with the connotations of the methodology of creating these works. By identifying the finer points of what erasure poetry is, these essays help us to understand the boundaries between erasure and blackout poetry.