Blacking out Jacket2 
& Jacket Magazine

There are only three major poetics journals that have pointedly focused on erasure poetry thus far: Jacket2 (and thus Jacket), The Kenyon Review, and Evening Will Come. Whereas Evening Will Come dedicated one issue to erasure poetry and The Kenyon Review’s coverage was predominantly written by only one author, Jacket2 has been continuously publishing on blackout and erasure poetry for years.

The journal is the digital reincarnation of Jacket magazine, a poetry and poetics magazine published by poet John Tranter from 1997 to 2010. It currently digitally hosts a searchable archive of Jacket’s forty issues as well as publishing new content on a semi regular basis. Both Jacket and Jacket2 focus on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics. While together they have published numerous book reviews and critical essays on blackout, erasure, and found poetry, there are two works that stand out as being significant pieces in the academic coverage of these genres: Jennifer Cheng’s essay series on the politics and poetics of  refraction and Travis Macdonald’s “A Brief History of Erasure Poetics.” 

Jennifer Cheng’s Essay Series

Throughout September 2016, poet Jennifer Cheng published twelve essays in Jacket2 investigating what she refers to as the politics and poetics of refractions. She describes her essays as exploring the idea that visual and mixed media art “shed[s] light on the poetics of language by manifesting it viscerally and tangibly…[and] how refractive poetries invoke alternative or marginal perspectives, constructing new meaning by moving beyond normalized ways of experiencing the world.” In order to do so, she looks at a variety of multimedia projects. Two of the essays, though, focus on what she refers to as erasure poetry. Though she predominantly focuses on M. NourbeSe Philip’s erasure poetry collection Zong! and never uses the phrase “blackout poetry,” the header image, for her first essay, shown below, uses imagery that is indicative of blackout poetry. 

In these two essays, Cheng refers to erasure as a means of refracting documents. In the first essay, she connects refraction and erasure by suggesting that erasure “disrupts, interrupts, modulates the original . . . literally ruptures the textual line and bends it…[and] creates a new work whose meaning does not stand alone but is informed by its process, by the shadow of the old document and the act of obfuscation that transforms it.” Whereas a majority of academic work on blackout and erasure has only tackled a single particular text, this first essay looks more at the entirety of erasure poetry as a genre by identifying common characteristics in reference to refraction.

While she focuses here on erasure, some of what she describes is applicable to blackout poetry. For instance, blackout poems also disrupt their source text and create works that are informed by the process of creating it. It is difficult to fully apply to blackout poetry, though, because Cheng goes on to identify things that are more specific to erasure poetry such as its connection to colonial oppression. Additionally, in the second essay, she focuses exclusively on erasure poetry. This specificity to erasure poetry is significant for identifying blackout poetry as a distinct category of poetry, however, as Chen highlights characteristics of erasure poetry that do not apply to blackout poetry.

For instance, she describes “Erasure as prism: the scattering of a bounded text into fragments, pieces, shards.” The way she describes what erasure does is almost comparable to how a dropped glass might shatter into a billion pieces upon hitting the kitchen floor. It is within that shattering and the emptiness between the pieces that meaning is now found. Blackout poetry, on the other hand, connects those pieces, and it is in that additive connection that meaning develops. She goes on to suggest that an erasure poet like Philip “excavates further to unbury.” But blackout poets purposefully bury part of their source texts. They cover the original words, they do not strip them away. By helping to define erasure, Chen opens space to identify differences between erasure and blackout poetry. In turn, this helps us to understand what blackout poetry is and is not. 

Travis Macdonald’s 
“A History of Erasure Poetics” 

In 2009, Travis Macdonald did something few have ever really attempted; he began trying to trace the origin of blackout and erasure poetry in his essay “A Brief History of Erasure Poetics.” He states that identifying this kind of history “is necessary” and hopes his work will “act as a guide for future practitioners in this increasingly important form.” He anticipates the erasure poetry will continue to grow and that scholars need to begin treating it academically as  a result. 

For a first history, Macdonald does well attempting to wade through an enormous amount of information. However, his desire to pinpoint the very beginning of erasure poetry gives some pause. Like many scholars, he does not differentiate between blackout and erasure poetry or given any kind of specific guidelines as to what he is determining as erasure poetry. In the second section, he connects erasure poetry with the poems of Sappho and Aeschylus. He suggests the fragility of the papyrus on which they were originally written has left the poems damaged and partially erased, thereby making them erasure poems even though they were not created as such. While an interesting notion to consider, this casts doubt upon his historical timeline and what he considers to be erasure poetry. It raises questions as to what is and is not erasure poetry without ever really answering these questions. 

His work is significant for erasure poetry, but it is only tangentially related to blackout poetry. He mentions Tom Phillips’ A Humument (1970) in comparison with the erasure poet Ronald Johnson, who began creating erasure poems at roughly the same time as Phillips began his book length blackout project. Most of his inclusion of Phillips only deals with this comparison rather than how Phillips has influenced other blackout poets or the field. He does mention a handful of other more contemporary blackout poets in the final and shortest section, including Austin Kleon, Mary Ruefle, Janet Holmes, and Jen Bervin. He does not dive much into their contributions, though. He simply briefly lists their publications and how they created them. 

Macdonald’s history was published in 2009, which was right before blackout poetry really began to take off in popularity in the mid-2010s. The lack of blackout poetry published at the time makes Macdonald’s conflation of erasure and blackout understandable. He had no frame of reference to distinguish between the two. However, we are now able to separate the two due to the number of blackout poetry publications within the past ten years since Macdonald wrote his history. Macdonald’s work was significant when he first published, but looking back on it with this new context, we see how he conflates the two. Moving forward, we should avoid conflating erasure and blackout poetry in order to give a more accurate history of these categories of poetry and how they have impacted society