King Speaking

 

“King Speaking” is a sequence excerpted from the latter half of a book-length erasure, Her Read, forthcoming from Texas Review Press in 2021. Her Read reconceives the entirety of The Meaning of Art (Faber & Faber, 1931), a highly regarded exploration of art from prehistory to the modern era by British art and cultural critic Herbert Read. Though the maternal body appears with frequency, zero womxn artists are included in the early editions of this text. In 1951, Barbara Hepworth becomes the sole female artist to be admitted.

 

I began this makeover summer of 2016, in that pre-election heat, when rage at the latest iterations of hate on the American political stage, in conjunction with erasures playing out in my own life, made other writing seem impossible. From the voice of the male critic surveying male bodies of work, I began excavating a first-person lyric, the imagined voice(s) of womxn artists.

 

The concept of “mastery” appears with frequency over the course of the book, issues of dominion—that is to say—control—over a medium of expression, over other humans, and of course, over the Earth. One may well ask, what is art but a pronunciation of mastery? One may ask, must it always be?

 

Though I call this erasure, collage is a more accurate descriptor of this late excerpt. The surgical reconstruction contrasts cruder, monochromatic pages early in the text—used canvases treated only with correction fluid. As the book advances, the speaker gains agency over the text, revising the rules to serve to her fluencies. One rule is not broken: all language excavated and redeployed in this text can be harvested from a single copy of Read’s seminal text.

 

Materials:  source text, correction fluid, archival inks, bookbinders glue, florist tissue, window shades, general purpose thread, embroidery floss.

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Healthful Living

I have an ongoing project called “is this your book.” First, I find old inscribed books. Then I make erasures in an effort to ferret out the inner workings of the inscriber. Some are poignant, some are odd. This one is healthful and about living.

 

The original book is Healthful Living: Based on the Essentials of Physiology by Jesse Feiring Williams (Macmillan, rev. 1932).

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Two Bible Stories

 

These erasures use ephemera taken from children’s Bible stories.

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Season Cluster

 

As collaborative artists and writers, we work together to create mixed-media expressions of our shared experience. The mosaic or collage structure of our work quilts together individual moments in time, allowing them to be experienced simultaneously. This view from our Almanac #9, Fall, remixes lines and phrases from three poems about autumn: “After Apple-Picking” by Robert Frost, “That time of year thou mayst in me behold” (Sonnet 73) by William Shakespeare, and “To Autumn” by John Keats.

 

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Insect Erasures

 

 

These erasure hybrids are made from the pages of an insect encyclopedia (The Nature Library: Butterflies VI, edited by W. J. Holland, 1898) found on a sidewalk in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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Four computer-generated erasures

I have been researching computer-generated literature for many years now. Over the past few months, I experimented with reduction to dot-to-dot as a method of generating erasure poetry. It started with restrictions with Hershey text but with these works I have been able to make a more complex, more emotionally connecting style.

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To All Whom It May Concern

“To All Whom It May Concern” is a triptych of documents from the Civil War that includes: 1. An erasure of the first page of a four-page letter written by Lyman Jones to his parents while he was held a prisoner of war in 1863; 2. A later photo of him with wife and two children; 3. His discharge orders, over which a second erasure is pasted—words cut from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” as published in his 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass.

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Plum Trees, Astray, Verso, A Little Croquis, and Snow Still

My erasures, inspired by the letters of Vincent van Gogh during the period in which he lived and painted in Arles, are part of a collection that I have been working on for the last few years. 

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Wory Gardn

“Wory Gardn” collages/erases text and images from: Work That Is Play by Mary Gardner (A Flannigan Company, 1908) and The Want to Know Book by Alfred O. Shedd (Whitman Publishing Company, 1924)

 

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November Nineteenth [On Erasure]

This erasure is from Donald Culross Peattie’s An Almanac for Moderns, a book of daily essays on the natural world written in the Midwest and published in 1935. Moore uses the book as part of a daily erasure practice, erasing the correspondent day and seeking to radically transform Peattie’s meditations, dramatically shifting the topic and focus of the original entries.

Peattie, Donald Culross. An Almanac for Moderns. Editions for the Armed Services, 1935.

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