Blacking Out The Kenyon Review 

A majority of the pieces written about blackout poetry published by The Kenyon Review were written by Andrew David King in the early to mid 2010s. In the preface to one of his most popular interviews with erasure poets, King was inspired by erasure and blackout poets to “put down the pencil and pick up a black marker instead.” This suggests that he is not just a scholar but a blackout poet as well, which may be why he wrote so many pieces about it for The Kenyon Review. While he did write a few pieces about erasure poetry as a broader category, most of King’s articles were interviews with found poets or reviews of erasure and blackout poetry collections. These interviews provided previously undiscussed insights into the process of creating blackout and erasure poetry, however. 

In 2012, King facilitated a collaborative interview between six contemporary blackout and erasure poets through a Google Doc.  King provided initial questions but the poets were able to organically respond to one another at their leisure, building off one another's answers without King’s influence or directing. He did this purposefully in order to allow the poets to guide the conversation and answer the questions “in the order they say fit and to the length they preferred.” To stay true to this methodology, King did not edit or erase any of their words for publication. He simply published the contents of the Google Doc with a brief introduction. This interview has become one of the most widely cited pieces of scholarship in discussions on erasure and blackout poetry because this organic conversation generated the first real recorded conversation on different methodologies, inspirations, and questions of authorship by blackout and erasure poets. 

The poets King included are fairly well known within the found poetry community, but they are not as well known as Austin Kleon, Tom Phillips, or Isobel O’Hare:

• Srikanth Reddy, author of Voyager 

• Matthea Harvey, author of Of Lamb 

• Janet Holmes, author of The Ms of M Y Kin

• M. NourbeSe Philip, author of Zong! 

• David Dodd Lee, author of Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere,

• Travis Macdonald, author of The O Mission Repo and “A Brief History of Erasure Poetics”

Though those involved in the interview are a mixture of erasure and blackout poets, King refers to them all as erasurists. He misidentifies blackout poetry as erasure throughout the article and does not even use the word blackout once. The piece is still relevant to blackout poetry, though, as it helps to establish a history of contemporary blackout poetry by opening up a conversation regarding these poets’ inspiration and first interactions with the category. 

Most of the poets interviewed mentioned Phillips’ A Humument, a blackout text composed from a Victorian novel, and Ronald Johnson’s Radi os, an erasure of the first four books of Paradise Lost. Yet, they did not credit either Phillips or Johnson with necessarily having inspired them. Reddy mentioned that before starting on Voyager he had heard of both works, but he did not actually read either until after he had begun creating his own erasure poems. Several also mentioned Jen Bervin’s Nets, an erasure of Shakespeare’s sonnets, and Mary Ruefle’s “whiteout” poems, blackout poems that use whiteout to cover the source text.

Uniquely, Macdonald credits a fellow student at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics named Michael Koshkin with introducing him to erasure. Koshkin published an erasure poetry chapbook called Parad e Rain with Big Game Books in 2006, but did not go on to publish any other notable works of erasure or blackout. None of the other poets mentioned being familiar with him, either. 

Lee stated his first experience with erasure was with visual art, specifically “Rauschenberg’s act, his erasing of a drawing by de Kooning,” which is inline with the experiences of many other blackout and erasure poets due to the popularity of Rauschenberg’s piece. Holmes also credited the art world as being one of her first introductions to blackout poetry, specifically Jenny Holzer’s redaction paintings. Based on the lack of scholarship surrounding blackout poetry and lack of programs focused on writing within the category, it can be assumed that it is not discussed much in college creative writing courses. It is definitely not discussed to the level that art courses discuss pieces like Rauschenberg’s and Holzer’s. Therefore, it makes sense that poets like Lee and Holmes might be introduced to erasure in the art world before becoming accustomed to it in the literary world. This connection has been talked about minimally in any current histories of blackout poetry, however. 

While these poets mention these different introductions to the form, they are careful to avoid saying any were the inspiration for their projects. As is common with blackout and erasure poets, most of the poets said it was something in their source text that convinced them to do their erasing or blacking out. Dodd recounts his experience with beginning to create Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere,:

This experience is echoed by several of the others in the interview. For instance, when discussing The O Mission Repo, Macdonald said “The title of and the initial idea for my own work emerged simultaneously at the moment, fully formed and demanding realization. So I grabbed a pencil and started dissecting the text right then and there.”  Poets such as Kleon and O’Hare have mentioned similar beginnings with blackout poetry. 

In terms of determining how blackout poetry has evolved, this is significant. Few poets can point to the exact moment that they first read or noticed blackout as a form. Therefore, it raises the question of if any one person created the form or if it a synchronously arose independently. Regardless, the number of different places, poets and poetry, these poets describe as introducing them to the category or that they have encountered speaks to the popularity of the form and thus the need for greater academic coverage of it.