Blacking out Victorian Literature:
The Beginning of Blackout Poetry
In 1966, a man named Tom Phillips started making A Humument, which is arguably one of the most well known works of blackout poetry today, because of a bet. He walked into a furniture shop with fellow artist R. B. Kitaj and declared, “the first book I can find for threepence, I’ll work on for the rest of my life.” As they were wondering the store, they stumbled across A Human Document, a small yellow Victorian novel by W. H. Mallock. When he picked up the book, Kitaj told him “If it’s a dime . . . that’s your book: and I’m your witness” and that was that.
Inspired by William Burroughs and John Cage, without even reading the book, Phillips began “treating” the book with “painting, painting, collage, and cut-up techniques'' that obscure a majority of Mallock’s original words. At first Phillips “merely scored out unwanted words with ink leaving some (often too many) to stand and the rest more or less readable beneath rapidograph hatching.” Over time, his methods evolved and became more in-depth, even going so far as to collage a photo of Mallock’s grave onto one of the pages. He employed numerous methods, but all of those methods focused on adding something over physically removing part of the book through erasing. After he finished treating every page, he published A Humument, pronounced “a hew-mew-ment,” in 1970 as an altered book that resembles blackout poems.
Phillips has gone on to publish five additional editions of the book over the past half century with the most recent coming out in 2016. Each time he reaches the end of the book, he turns to the beginning and attempts to rework the page. Some pages resisted reworking, so he did not create six different versions of each page, but each edition of the book is significantly different than the previous. Additionally, he also created a digital version of the book for iPads and iPhones in 2010. The app, however, stopped being available for download in the mid 2010s.
Because of the uniqueness of the project, A Humument continues to draw attention from readers, academics, and journalists alike even half a century after its initial publication. It has garnered more attention from academics, in fact, than most other erasure or blackout poetry projects. Scholars such as Courtney Pfahl in “after the / Unauthor: Fragmented Author Functions in Tom Phillips’s A Humument” and Tammy Lai-Ming Ho in “Book-eating Book: Tom Phillips’s A Humument (1966-)” have discussed his methodologies and the impact of the book on the art and writing worlds.
Is Phillips a Blackout Poet?
Original page of the first page
First version 1973
Second version 2010
Philllips’s popularity has caused him to become almost synonymous with blackout poetry. However, the identification of A Humument is questionable at best. While Phillips treated the book in a way that is comparable to traditional blackout poets’s methodologies in regards to how he covered portions of the source text, A Humument is not necessarily poetry. In discussing his project, Phillips states that he has “so far extracted from [Mallock’s] book well over a thousand segments of poetry and prose.” Phillips does not describe his work as poetry or prose. Rather he only says there are elements of both that he included in the book.
One argument against A Humument’s status as blackout poetry is that the project has more of a narrative quality to it than is typical of the genre. As he was writing, Philips says characters emerged on their own to interact with Mallock’s protagonists. He calls the main character of A Humument its “hidden hero” and describes him as “the downmarket and blokeish . . . Bill Toge,” pronounced Bill “Toe-dge.” Philips creates a whole story around Bill, but the narrative is fairly non-linear and not always cohesive, as Bill only appears when Philips’s personal rules allow. Philips placed numerous restrictions on himself including that Bill had to appear “wherever the words ‘together’ or ‘altogether’ occurred.” This extended narrativity is more indicative of prose than poetry.
Numerous erasure and blackout poetry projects have incorporated this same kind of narrative structuring, such as Janet Holmes’s 2009 erasure poetry collection The Ms of M Y Kin and Travis Mcdonald’s 2008 erasure and blackout project The O Mission Repo. Reviews of the two often compare them to Phillips because of this similarity in narrative structure. However, collections published after Holmes’s and Macdonald’s utilize less of narrative structure and focus instead more on a particular theme or type of source text. Today a majority of blackout poetry collections have forgone this narrative structure, which suggests it should not be considered a necessary characteristic for something to be referred to as blackout poetry.
Though many hold A Humument and Phillips as synonymous with blackout poetry, it may be more accurate to describe A Humument as an altered book, a book that has been changed from its original form into a new one by an artist. This would mean that it would thereby also be more accurate to refer to Phillips as an artist rather than a blackout poet. On the “About” page of his website, Phillips is described as “an artist” and his work on A Humument is referred to as Phillips “dedicat[ing] himself to making art out of the first secondhand book he could find.” Nowhere does he mention poetry or refer to himself as a poet.
Though he may not be a blackout poet, Phillips is still an important part of the contemporary history of blackout poetry. His work has inspired numerous blackout and erasure poets from Travis Macdonald to Srikanth Reddy to Matthea Harvey. Macdonald credits Phillips as having “opened my eyes to the physical possibilities of erasure as something applied to the text rather than removed from it.” Phillips opened the door for this idea of adding to create a poem, which is what separates blackout poetry from erasure. Due to this, it is not inaccurate to suggest that he is one of the grandfathers of the category, but it would be inaccurate to call him the founder of the category.