Understanding the Politics of Blacking Out

 In a 2012 collaborative interview with The Kenyon Review, Andew David King asked six erasure and blackout poets, “Is erasure in any sense a political act?” Most answered no. Well-known blackout poet and author of “A Brief History of Erasure Poetics” Travis Macdonald even went so far as to say, “No. I don’t think so. Not at all. Sinceriously [sic].” The other poets in the interview echoed his stance, though not as fervently. Macdonald went on to suggest that “the business of politics is to politicize everything. The business of poetry is to poeticize everything.” Erasure poet Srikanth Reddy expanded on this by suggesting that erasure poetry is “poeticizing the political,” if it is using a political source text. However, it does not have to be political. 

Many of the poets participating in the interview had created political blackout or erasure poems, meaning that they had created these poems in order to develop political commentary. Those that had not, though, maintained that their works were not political. For instance, Matthea Harvey, author of numerous erasure poems, stated that her poetry collection Of Lamb, “isn’t meant to be a political act—more of an homage.” Though the poets in this interview argue their blackout and erasure poems are only political if they intended for them to be political, other blackout and erasure poets feel differently.

In the erasure poetry themed issue of Evening Will Come, several erasure and blackout  poets discussed the inherently political nature of found poetry, particularly erasure and blackout poetry. In her essay in this issue, erasure poet Solmaz Sharif argues that “every poem is an action. Every action is political. Every poem is political.” Sharif suggests that manipulating another’s words makes the poem political even if the poet did not intend it to be so. 

The Kenyon Review interview touches on this by asking poets, “How did you navigate the politics of appropriating another’s voice as your own?” Macdonald responded by saying, “As far as the appropriation of other voices is concerned, I would argue that the very idea of language ownership is a political act which erasure seeks to subvert.” He suggests that rather being political by stealing someone else’s words for your own poem, blackout and erasure poetry asserts that we cannot even own words like we normally think we can. However, Macdonald comes to this conversation from a place of privilege, not belonging to communities that may have had their words stolen or erased. 

For example, Sharif, who does have experiences with this kind of theft of language, considers the political impact differently. She remarks that when she first saw erasure being used for poetry she was “horrified” because she connects erasure with the erasure of the words, language, and lives of marginalized communities and individuals by oppressive powers such as the government and colonialism. Sharif asserts that “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.” Macdonald’s response fails to consider the political connotations of erasure that Sharif introduces.  These political connotations inform the creation of blackout and erasure poems even if the poems are created to be apolitical or to subvert the idea of ownership of language because the poems are being created in a society that has erased groups of peoples in order to profit off of them.