Blacking Out U.S. Warfare
Throughout the 2000s, the United States was embroiled in political and military conflict with the Middle East, particularly Iran and Iraq. Poets Janet Holmes and Travis Macdonald took to erasure and blackout poetry as a way to both highlight and investigate this turmoil. Their works rely on significantly different source texts, but the poets manipulate these texts for similar purposes. Both seek to call out the government in a way through their work by effectively critiquing the government’s actions and even sometimes lack of action. Holmes’s The Ms of M Y Kin and Macdonald’s The O Mission Repo were two of the first intentionally political blackout or erasure projects published in the United States that have gained significant public attention.
Neither of these books are fully blackout poetry collections. Holmes’s is erasure poetry, as she purposefully erases portions of Dickinson’s work, leaving the remaining words lingering in white space., Macdonald similarly blurs the lines between erasure and blackout poetry in The O Mission Repo. He incorporates a mixture of erasure and blackout practices in his work. Each chapter is modified in a different way from covering with black lines, to blurring, to erasing, to even being arranged as a musical score. Though they are not specifically blackout poetry, they have influenced the greater blackout poetry community and set the stage for the boom of political blackout and erasure poetry following the 2016 presidential election.
Macdonald’s book was published on September 11, 2008, while Holmes’s was released just a few months later in February 2009, a few months before Macdonald’s essay “A Brief History of Erasure Poetics” came out in Jacket Magazine. Their books marked the beginning of a new era of popularity for erasure and blackout poetry, as before there had only been a handful of books written in these categories of poetry. Those that had been published had minimal reach, staying predominantly within creative writing communities. The political connotation of these two books, however, made them more accessible for people who may not be as used to experimental poetry that would have possibly been turned off by the experimental nature of other erasure and blackout poetry publications.
from The Ms of M Y Kin by Janet Holmes
from The O Mission Repo by Travis Macdonald
Macdonald’s blackout and erasure poetry project The O Mission Repo uses The 9/11 Commission Report as source material. A review in Rain Taxi by Elizabeth Robinson described the book as Macondald “burrow[ing] through the 9/11 report (itself heavily redacted prior to public release) to create an alternate text that is downright lyrical.” In his review of the book in Found Poetry Review, Douglas Luman suggests Macdonald is attempting to make it appear that the source text’s “secret subtext has been decoded.” As such, it appears that Macdonald is making some kind of purposeful commentary on The 9/11 Commission Report through this project.
Like Tom Phillips’ famous blackout poetry book A Humument, Macdonald creates a narrative that incorporates characters and a plot. For instance, the United States becomes referred to as “Unit” whereas Osama Bin Laden becomes a character known as “Lad.” Macdonald also interests himself into the project as “author,” which Robinson regards as a way for Macdonald “owning up to his role in revising the original document while also disrupting its authority.” He is clear in that it is his lens through which we as readers are decoding the work.
While Macdonald purposefully uses a political source text for his commentary on 9/11 and the United States’ political relations with the Middle East, Holmes picks something that is distinctly more poetic, Emily Dickinson’s poetry. The poems used are not, however, completely apolitical. Holmes specifically erases sections of Dickinson’s Civil War era poetry in order to discuss the United States’ wars and political conflict with Afghanistan and Iran. According to Elizabeth Robinson, Holmes, like Macdonald and Phillips, does use a “well-wrought narrative structure.” Her book does not feature a main character like Phillips’ Bill Toge, but a cast of characters named things such as “Despair,” “Blood/the puppet,” “The Man” and “The Woman.” An end note in the book states that despite these more generic names, these characters refer to specific real individuals such as prisoners from Abu Gharib prison, Osama Bin Ladin, Donald Rumsfeld, and journalist Daniel Pearl. Holmes does not include an author character like Macdonald, but it is only through her author’s note that this connection is made clear. This achieves a similar effect as Macdonald’s author character.
Macdonald and Holmes’s work in their respective books provided the basis for the idea that blackout and erasure poetry allows us to have a conversation with what rules us and opened up an invitation for other poets to begin negotiating their role within the United States political systems. They set an example for how to process one’s frustration with the government’s action or lack thereof, especially when they do not agree with what politicians are doing. As average citizens, they do not have much say in how things beyond helping elect officials, but by manipulating a government document, they are able to add their say in. Poet Jerrod Schwarz touches on this in his foreword to Make Blackout Poetry: Activist Edition:
“You are owed a conversation with what rules you. . .when you pick up a Sharpie, a paintbrush or a pair of craft scissors to reshape these ordinances, addresses, and government records you are worthy of that conversation.”
He goes on to say that “whatever remains when you’ve finished, that is the previous distillation of what America means to you.” Macdonald and Holmes gave permission to poets like Schwarz and others who came to start finding their identity and voice in these government documents.