eraser

I left the LARGE AND HEAVY Collected Poems of Kennith Koch at school today - it was just too much. To replace it I looked up some contemporary and conceptual poetry that was mentioned in Notes on Conceptualisms by Robert Fitterman and Vanessa Place. Below is an excerpt from one of those books. This is sonnet 63 from Jen Bervin's Nets. It is helpful to put this in context so here is the book's afterward, by the writer herself:

I stripped Shakespeare's sonnets bare to the "nets" to make she space of the poem open, porous, possible - a divergent elsewhere. When we write poems, the history of poetry is with us, pre-inscribed in the white of the page; when we read or write poems, we do it with or against the palimpsest.

Jen Bervin - sonnet 63 from Nets

It is nice to think about this type of erasure (a form/working method of appropriation based conceptual poetry) in relationship to this Robert Rauschenberg piece:

Robert Rauschenberg - Erased De Kooning Drawing (traces of ink and crayon on paper, mat, label, and gilded frame) 1953

And, to get all Lawrence Weschler, here is my take on the previous. (Plus a few more here)

Adam Farcus - Erased Rauschenberg Plate, 1 (page from Robert Rauschenberg monograph, eraser marks) 2009-2010