If you write out "The Poems of Emily Dickinson" and erase some of the letters very neatly and precisely, you can get to The ms of m y kin - the manuscript of my kin, as it were; the manuscript of my family. It might also be said to be the manuscript of my kind. The practice of erasure was most famously accomplished (and perhaps invented) by the British artist Tom Phillips in his book A Humument (an erasure of a Victorian novel titled A Human Document) and later, by the American poet Ronald Johnson, who erased Milton's Paradise Lost into a book called Radi os. In Phillips's books-he did more than one version of A Humument-the artist created paintings over each page of the novel, reserving only certain words that told a different story than did the original work. (A new character, called "Toge," emerged from the word "together," for example.) Johnson, a poet, simply removed the words he did not wish to use as if whiting them out-the remaining words stood in the same relationship to each other as they did in the original poem. (Janet Holmes)

About the Author
Janet Holmes is an award-winning author of four previous books, most recently F2F from University of Notre Dame Press. She edits Ahsahta Press, an all-poetry press in the United States featuring avant-garde work, and teaches in the MFA Program in Creative Writing at Boise State University, Boise, Idaho. She is married to the fiction writer, poet, and memoirist Alvin Greenberg.


Book Information
ISBN 9781848610354
Author Janet Holmes
Format Paperback
Page Count 180
Imprint Shearsman Books
Publisher Shearsman Books
Weight(grams) 236g
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 140mm * 10mm