Jill Maji's Labor (Nightboat, 2012)

Jill Magi describes her book LABOR (Nightboat, 2012) as "A fiction ... / An installation / A handmade employee handbook." But, of course, it's also A Poetry. Read more about LABOR, and see more images of the author's text and text-work on Magi's site, here.

Find excerpted poems from LABOR at jubilat, here; and at The Brooklyn Rail, here. Read reviews at CSU's Center for Literary Publishing, here; at Tupelo Quarterly, here; and at Drunken Boat, here.

In an interview with Andy Fitch, Magi explains how, when drawing from source texts, such as those she found at the Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives (a public archive at NYU's Bobst Library), "[T]he words are openings into, portals into something generative, a story about to come." 

still from LABOR: Finding Guide

LABOR is a physical, not merely intellectual work; Magi reminds us, "I actually made boxes, lined them with fake fur, and put documents in them while I was writing LABOR."
 
Even more: view Magi's LABOR: Finding Guide on YouTube; read her curated chapbook Labor Poetic Labor! (Essay Press), online here; and, be sure to check out Magi's series on Textile Poetics at Jacket2.

The Place of Scraps (Talon Books, 2013)

Jordan Abel's The Place of Scraps (Talon Books, 2013), from Marius Barbeau's Totem Poles (1950)

Totem Poles, Vol. 1 (Ottawa: King's Printer,  1950)

The Place of Scraps "explores the complicated relationship between First Nations cultures and ethnography. [These] poems simultaneously illuminate Barbeau’s intentions and navigate the repercussions of the anthropologist’s actions." - explains Abel on his website.

Mercedes Eng explains, "Totem poles tell the history of a people. Like its source, Scraps deploys linguistic and visual systems of representation to record First Nations history but unlike its source, it reveals anthropology as a colonial weapon in its creative distillation of Barbeau’s ethnography." Read the rest of her consideration of The Place of Scraps at Jacket 2, here.

Read an interview on Lemonhound here, more about Abel's project here, here and here, watch Abel on YouTube here, visit his website here.

David Dodd Lee's Sky Booths in the Breath Somewhere: the Ashbery erasure poems (BlazeVOX, 2010).

"Most of the poems I chose to erase came out of three books from A’s middle period--Hotel Lautreamont, And the Stars Were Shining, and Flow Chart," Lee explains in a very thorough interview here; he goes on: "I will say I wasn’t trying to ruin Ashbery’s originals—it felt to me like I was simply trying to take advantage of A’s genius (he’s got plenty to spare) and make something wholly separate seeming (stress here on the word 'seeming')." More info and excerpts here. Reviews here and here.

From As We Know (Subito Press, 2014), a collaborative project by Andy Fitch and Amaranth Borsuk. As We Know "repositions erasure procedures at the origins of (rather than in response to) a published text. Here Amaranth Borsuk has taken Andy Fitch’s summer diary and reshaped 60 passages...into a new type of collective confessional/constructivist collage that brings her own voice into the text and foregrounds the tensions of authorship," according to the As We Know website.

See more images of the project at The Volta and Matter, discussion here, here and here, a conversation between Borsuk & Fitch here.

 

Holly Melgard's The Making of the Americans (Troll Thread, 2012), in which she deletes all repeated words from her source text (Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans (1925)). Melgard's work is viewable online here.

Melgard explains, "Poems can exploit what it is in books that makes texts appear as “text”; how their distributions and multiple frameworks of production may play a material role in their composure, their poetics. Like Gertrude Stein’s The Making of Americans, which gets called 'unreadable' because it’s super 'repetitive'.... NOW 'there is no such thing as repetition' in The Making of Americans, because I deleted it." 

Read more of Melgard's ideas over at Elective Affinities, here. 

Plus, it's listed (along with some other interesting and conceptual work) as one of the top poetry books of 2012 by MS Magazine! (Thanks, Harriet, for the link.) 

We can also purchase a physical copy of Melgard's work here.

From Erica Baum's Dog Ear (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2011).

"I’m reauthoring the text in this simple act of folding the paper which creates a new view. I want the compositions to work both formally and linguistically on several levels simultaneously. It looks simple but it’s actually very hard to find ones where everything comes together. I think in order for concrete poetry to succeed it has to operate in both these ways. I’m also adding a third thing to this mix because these have to be found in a book. In this case the constraint is the page sequence....I’m looking for something that in some sense already exists and has the potential to yield something else," Baum says about her project, here.

Some discussion here and here, more images here and here, and many more links on the UDP page, here.

 

1) From the ongoing project "Plagiarizing Poetry Magazine."  The author AMF explains "This project is to explore the meaning of the word plagiarism," and  "My project hopes to push Poetry magazine and its readers into a discussion about artistic thought, ownership and originality, which can only take place now in our interconnected world," here. The complete blog, with more images and information is here.

2) The original cover of Poetry Magazine, April 2012. More about Poetry here. 

3) Also, the Winter 2012 issue of Abraham Lincoln.

Deborah Chodoff's "Sacred Poem XXXVII" (2007), in the Center For Book Arts "Multiple, Limited, Unique: Selections from the Permanent Collection" exhibit. See more images from the exhibit here.

Robert Fitterman's The Sun Also Also Rises: A Hemingway Reader (No Press, 2008?), a chapter-by-chapter conceptual response to Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. Fitterman explains, "I have erased my way through Hemingway's original text, leaving behind only the phrases that begin with the pronoun 'I'," here. Read an excerpt in .pdf here, and more (and more editions) here and here. Fitterman's website is here.

Bradley Harrison's "Gray," the last in a series of erasures of his own poem "Her Problem of Gravity" (2012). Read them all over at The Offending Adam, here. And, with other self-erasures (with white-out!) in his newly released volume Diorama of a People, Burning (Ricochet 2012), here.

Gregory Betts' The Others Raisd in Me: 150 Readings of Sonnet 150 (Pedlar Press, 2009), 150 versions and permutations of Shakespeare's Sonnet #150. "The work examines ideas of selfhood from the 17th century into the present, flirting with a cyborgian future," here. Susan Holbrook describes the project as "push and pull, the simultaneity of inflation and infolding, spill and vacuum, all performing between the covers of a book which is itself both smaller and bigger than your standard poetry collection" here. More here. Betts' "plunderverse" project, here. More discussion & examples here, here, here, and here; more about Betts here.
See also this version by Trainwreck Press, here, and--of course--other Shakespearean experiments here.

From an "illustrated erasure," Of Lamb, a collaboration between Matthea Harvey and Amy Jean Porter (McSweeney's, 2011). The source text is A Portrait of Charles Lamb, by Lord David Cecil (Constable, 1986?). Harvey explains, "I don't really know how to stop. Essentially it's like having a very pleasurable crossword puzzle with infinite answers," here. More here, here, and here and here. Plus, Oprah likes it!

Uljana Wolf's Cal Mi Jane, 25 poems based on the "Letters of Calamity Jane to her daughter," by Jean Hickock McCormick, aka Janey (1941) and first performed as a collaborative music project in 2010. Here's one:

"VII"
another played that part / a different Jane / a little less than a post office / the Black Hills brought mail to you / a Copy of Jane / I now take my pen / I am sorry / I aint got any other

And we can read all the poems online in the Spring 2011 issue of Dear Navigator, here.

Srikanth Reddy's Voyager (University of California Press, 2011), an erasure of In the Eye of the Storm, Kurt Waldheim’s 1985 memoir. Reddy explains, "I began to delete words from Kurt Waldheim’s memoirs in the autumn of 2003, hoping, for reasons beyond me, to discover something like poetry hidden within his book," here. Some sample poems here, here, here, and here, and discussion here, here, here, here, and here.

Selections from Travis MacDonald's The O Mission Repo [vol 2] up at The Offending Adam, here. "Listen to the music, repetition and lyricism it has discovered in the daunting and dry pages of a government report," suggests Ryan Winet in his introduction to the poems. More selections here. Also, read MacDonald's new chapbook of O Mission erasures--"Sight and Sigh" (Beard of Bees, April 2011) recently released, here. My previous post about The O Mission Repo here.

Susan Winn's "Field of Greens" (2006?), which used to be Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (~1885) on display at the Portland (Maine) Public Library. More here.