W( )oles and ( )holes: Politically Engaged Erasure Poetry in Twenty-First-Century United States

• Applicant: Dr. Mahshid Mayar
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; African, American and Oceania Studies ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 524829573

Invested in the ways the political pervades the poetic and the poetic manifests the political in twenty-first-century U.S. poetry, the present project proposes to study politically engaged instances of “erasure poetry” that have been published in the wake of the “War on Terror.” The proposed project investigates the violent yet close commerce that erasure poetry strikes between documents and poems. It does so by studying the production (deformance), the inner architecture – including form, blank space, layering of texts (reformance) –, and the reception of erasure (performance). Interpreted as texts that provide a new, critical interpretation of the history of the U.S. empire, a corpus of erasure poems (poems series and entire books of poetry) are analyzed in this project as “documents-poems”: texts that are not only literary and aesthetic but also documentary and archival. Within this framework, a “document-poem” is a text that is at once poetry and document: what a text is and what else it is, what else it has been, or what else it strives to become through erasure. Centering its attention on poetry’s double capacity in relation to archives and the documents they contain in a century that has been characterized by the tumultuous nexus of information excess, state secrecy, and documentary non-transparency, the proposed research project delivers an in-depth, comparative close-reading of politically engaged works of erasure side by side and against the original documents from which they are composed. The project’s unique contribution consists of an in-depth examination of the subversive labor performed by the critical responses that erasure poetry has given to the imperial violences as the latest in a series of historical moments at which the United States has risen to empire. Furthermore, by examining the various ways in which erasure poetry deploys form (audio as well as visual) as a reflection of its dissenting labor, this project investigates the close and meaningful correspondence between how erasure poetry looks on the page and how it sounds to the ear: fragmented, panting, illegible. In thinking of the archival through the poetic, the proposed project is of urgent relevance for American Studies since it offers new insights into the ways erasure poetry (a) envisions literature as a means of textual subversion against those who have long occupied positions of power; (b) raises awareness about the “documentary politics” at work in the complex cultures of misinformation, secrecy, and distrust that the U.S. empire pursues; (c) sheds light on the complexities of a political system that strives to uphold the empire in and out of classified documents, distorted archival records, and redacted, declassified files; and (d) can be studied as a means to re-map, re-conceive, and intervene in established archival practices in order to subvert and re-imagine the archives of empire.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants