excavations

There has always been a matrix for writing and often enough, if not always, that matrix has been another piece of writing (hence Bloom’s notion of ‘the anxiety of influence’). Homer and Shakespeare distilled various historical sources for their writings and poetry, when one of its functions was to carry information, would bring concision to accounts which, of their rambling nature, were otherwise difficult to remember. In more recent times the process is visible to us since the ‘originals’ are at least accessible for those who wish to investigate. Charles Reznikoff made plain his task in the Testimony books. He would make use of legal documents describing court cases, and in pruning them of the expected verbosity and breaking them into lines would provide a kind of portrait of America over the years 1885 to 1915. Reznikoff noted that his intention was not to pervert the material but to lend it a greater immediacy by divesting it of legalese and undue repetition. In my own book, The Ash Range, I worked with existing texts in a similar way. This kind of writing operates from a sense that there’s a poem in there somewhere even if poetry was far from the minds of the original authors.

There is a further kind of excavation however that I want to think about here: the kind that pulls something entirely different from existing texts. If you could say that the kind of writing Reznikoff was interested in doing worked like a précis of the original text, this other kind of writing does no such thing. Instead, it discovers in the text another buried text that, while it might comment on the original material, might also be something the original author may never have intended. In some cases it can be like a repressed text silently waiting inside the original to be liberated by the second author. The English artist Tom Phillips has made many versions of the book called A Humument, the original source of which was an undistinguished Victorian novel called A Human Document. Phillips overpainted pages from this book leaving spaces where visible words would work together to make another text as can be seen here:


Jonathan Williams provided an account of this kind of writing, referencing Phillips’ books as well as the practises of others like Guy Davenport, Edwin Morgan and Thomas A Clark, in a preface to his own work, ‘Excavations from the case-histories of Havelock Ellis’. Ellis’s book, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, had come out in three editions between 1901 and the version that Williams used. ‘Impressed with the frank, but courtly, narratives from a time usually garbled in the trappings of the Forsyte family or the circumambience of the James brothers’, Williams used cutouts laid over the prose text to isolate phrases that would then stand out with greater immediacy. Here are a couple of sections from this work:

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXthe great
physician
XXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX’Masturbation,’ he said, ‘is death.
XXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXa number of young men
XXXXXXcome
XXXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXI tell them
XXXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXkill yourself
XXXXXXX
[History XIII]

and:

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXIn Austria
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXthe Englishmen who come
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXsummers for climbing
XXXXXXXpeasants
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXare willing to pay
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXthe seasonal price
XXXXXX
[History XV]

Shearsman have just published a book by American poet Janet Holmes which takes a further step with this kind of writing, working from texts of an already highly regarded poet, Emily Dickinson. The poems in Holmes’ book The Poems of Emily Dickinson often mine several of the originals so it’s not convenient to show them adjacently. But Holmes notes at the top of the page the stretches these pieces have emerged from so it’s possible to go back and read the earlier texts. The Dickinson poems date from the Civil War period though this is often not explicit. Holmes’ own work reflects the age of the Iraq Wars. Here is one of the poems, ‘1862.46’ (and RW Franklin’s numbers used for Dickinson’s poems in his edition are 425-429):

I gave Myself to
XXXX
The Solemn
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXVision
XXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXin the
XXXXXsubtleXXXXXXXXXXlie –
XXXX
XXXX
XXSome
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXpredicted
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXthem
XXXXXXdoXXXXXXus
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXwrong
XXXX
We
XXXX
XXXX
XXXXXwitness
XXXX
A Moment
XXXX
XXXXXXXXfit our Vision to the Dark
XXXX
And meet the
XXXX
XXXXXXXXlarger – darkness
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
The Bravest
XXXXXXXXXXXhit
Directly
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
XXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXknow ‘tis
XXXGlory –
XXXX
XXXGlory
XXXX
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXand
XXXX
XXXXXXXXXMight
Assert themselves –