![]() ![]() citizens about the dangers of traveling to Burma, to draw attention to the fact that the United States is turning a blind eye to what’s happening in that country. has ability to provide assistance.ĭubbs uses the source material, which warns U.S. The citizens to Burma leave due to life-threatening risks. Note that telecommunications become limited or unavailable. ![]() citizensĪmericans avoid and limit their outside communication Reproduced with permission of the author. Dubbs comments on censorship in Burma/Myanmar following a government coup and many years of state-sponsored genocide. ![]() ![]() Embassy in Burma on Septementitled “Message to U.S. Example: “Media Blackout”, poem for Burma by M.A. A communique from the government, official and stiff, can become an indictment of inaction when censored by a poet. While a news article might tiptoe around the issue, a poet may take that text and redact it so the message is raw and unyielding. Rather, it’s more honest or blunt, flipping the idea of censorship on its head and making the reader see the truth. Using erasure, words are blacked out, but what’s left behind isn’t a sanitized version. This is often done with a text that is frequently censored or banned. This resemblance has led to the form being commonly used to comment on the very act of censorship. The visual element of blackout poetry recalls redacted text of government documents and letters home from soldiers at war. Blackout poems are often statements on censorship Since Benjamin Franklin’s time, erasure writing has gone from being a fun game played among friends to a serious art form that comments on society, as we can see in some of the ways blackout poetry is used now. Phillips employs collage, cut-ups, and paint to redo the entirety of this obscure text.Īs it’s been in development for so long, it’s an interesting way to see how blackout poetry has evolved over the years as it uses techniques popularized by the Beats and more modern techniques as well. Image: Thames & HudsonĪ Humument uses many techniques of erasure verse to create a work that is truly an amalgamation of the literary and aesthetic. The cover page of Tom Phillips' A Humument, 2010 edition. Its first iteration was published in 1973, and a second edition with new iterations and developments was published in 2010. This work is interesting, particularly because Phillips has been working on it continuously since 1966. Among them were Ronald Johnson’s RADI OS, an erasure poem of John Milton’s Paradise Lost, and Tom Phillips’ A Humument, a painted collage of Victorian author William Hurrell Mallock’s, A Human Document.Ī Humument’s title comes from a deletion of Mallock’s title, firmly establishing this as a work of erasure verse. Many works of erasure or blackout poetry came in the following decades from different artistic movements. Though Burroughs also worked in cut-up poetry, he was more deliberate in arranging his words with published works such as the Nova trilogy. This tradition of chopping and interchanging words continued with the Beat poets of the 1960s, primarily William S. Tristan Tzara, one of the movement's founders, took a meta approach to the form and even wrote a poem about how to make Dadaist poems using scissors. Using a collaging technique, they rearranged words in texts until they became something new and weird. One of the ways they did this was by playing with language. Caleb Whiteford, painted by Sir Joshua Reynoldsįor another hundred years or so, things were all quiet on the blackout poetry front - until the Dadaists came on the scene in the early 20th century.Įntrenched in surrealism and absurdism, the Dada movement created strange and irrational art as a response to the senseless slaughter of the First World War. Whiteford published his creations, distributing them amongst his friends - however, it wasn’t seen as a serious literary endeavor but more of a fun lark amongst intellectuals. One of the earliest known examples of blackout poetry can be attributed to Caleb Whiteford, a neighbor of Benjamin Franklin who would redact the local newspaper, replacing serious news with jokes and puns. Click to tweet! The form may have started as a joke in the 1700s ![]()
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