The Monarch Review’s own Todd Jannausch installed Gallery 206 in Occidental Park in Seattle, Washington on May 31st 2011. The Gallery is a re-fabricated phone booth exhibiting original work by Seattle artists on its 19 panels. There is also a phonebook that contains the work of 206 Seattle Artists. When the receiver is lifted to the ear, Dave Abramson‘s music comes through the line. Andrew Bartel’s “Erasures” and poems, titled “Called Back”, appear on one of the 19 panels. I had a chance to see the panel before the installation, and asked him to write the following essay. As both a poet and visual art critic, and given the nature of this particular work, which skews the bounds of  visual art and poetry, I figured Andrew would be a perfect candidate to write a piece addressing “mixed media” and poetry at large. Being a poet is hard. It doesn’t pay, and no one will ever care as much about it as you do. It’s a thankless task, and one that can be utterly debilitating. I admire Andrew’s ability to explicate intelligently the sorts of cognitive involutions that come with the territory.   -Caleb Thompson

So I had been thinking of ways to present my writing in a physical form, to emphasize the physical nature of text and paper and therefore the effect of these physical materials on the experience of reading, and I experimented with “erasing” text from the yellowed pages of old American poetry anthologies, first with an actual eraser (which didn’t work) then with the end of a standard paper clip, and finally with the edge of a non-standard paper clip (a coppery, flat one) with the intention of typing my poetry on the then-blank pages. And by typing, I mean with an actual typewriter, this mint-green Olympia with italicized font I found in the garage of a rental property of my mother’s, which further emphasizes the physical nature of text through it’s obvious manual application of ink, actual impressions of the typeface in the paper, and occasional piercing or puncturing of the paper, especially with the period.

Why emphasize the physical nature of a medium (poetry) that seems to exist in a non-physical realm (the brain), especially in an essay that will be published online, digitally, in this very format you are now reading? Perhaps it has something to do with the sudden obsolescence of print media, and my reaction is a conservative one, a not whole-hearted embracing of the “new mediums” but a kind of recoiling and cherishing of my typewriter (made in “Western” Germany in 1948) and paper and books, which I, at the risk of seeming sentimental, smell and caress and generally experience tactilely, as well as in the standard mode. And then there is the idea that a poem exists as a thing on a page and not simply as a vessel for meaning or thoughts. And in my personal practice, I attach significance to a poem that I have worked over on a page, crossed out and re-written, doodled on. After a while it becomes a document that acts, at the very least, as evidence of my existence as a literate human being.

The idea of this kind of historical document is at play in “Called Back,” the pages of which I appropriated from a 1950 edition of The Oxford Book of American Verse. It’s not just that the book is old, though that is part of it (the poems had been quietly existing inside of this book for about 60 years before I read them), it’s that the pages in fact preserve editorial alterations of Dickinson’s poems not fully corrected until 1955, when Thomas H. Johnson published The Poems of Emily Dickinson in three volumes “including variant readings critically compared with all known manuscripts.” Even though the poems are infinitely reproducible, this particular book is not. It was painful to obliterate the text one letter at a time, and while I scratched away the old ink I was reading, and sometimes forgetting to read (as the scratching was pretty monotonous), so I’d try to read the effaced text through my own obliteration and through my memory of previously reading, and my erasing further enforced the documentary nature of paper itself, which recorded my scrapings and rubbings, and also retained a ghost image of the text that can still be “read” in one way or another.

It’s not a terribly original idea, you know, effacing a document (there’s Rauschenberg’s “Erased deKooning” and Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes and Matt McCormick’s short The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal, not to mention those CIA documents with the blacked out sections and other various forms of censorship and human disappearing…), but I think it’s a valid metaphor for my own anxieties about writing, which, let’s not beat around the bush, involves fundamental questions of self-worth in the face of monumental and ever-increasing literary achievements piling up in many anthologies and in bookstores and online magazines. And then that’s compounded by the knowledge of a very literal shit-stream of worthless poetic and artistic failures (obvious to anyone who has a modicum of critical acumen or taste, and dependent on perspective) and of which the majority of my work belongs (to the shit-stream, that is). Here’s the scenario: If I type up a poem, about the deserts of Egypt, for example, and I publish it in the Monarch Review and you read it, then, at least at that time, you are not reading a poem by Emily Dickinson, and therefore, every poem I write and force other people to read is an “erasure” of an Emily Dickinson poem, theoretically. And so any of my (published) work necessarily contributes to a kind of dumbing down of culture in general unless my work has some sort of merit, whether aesthetic or conceptual or otherwise, but even if it did have some merit, it’s still an erasure. You see the kind of paranoid flagellating this could devolve into (and often does).

I think of the endless self-promotion of writers and artists these days, which is both pathetic and admirable to me. I know enough about the machinations of book marketing and artist promotion to say that artistic merit has much less to do with success than I’d like to imagine. Fortunately, in the world of poetry, there isn’t a lot at stake in terms of money or fame. Yet the cultural erasure continues as the standard operation of artists and, to a lesser degree, writers since the Moderns: “Make it New” is Pound’s oft-quoted exhortation that still rules much of contemporary art and seems to encourage the break down of distinct modes of art-making into multi-media mush that can have no memory of a collective human experience because it’s like a hyper-sensory system overload and has devolved into appropriating other people’s works and even destroying art in the name of originality or conceptual propositions. Consider the 288,355 new books (and editions) published in 2010 in the US alone,[i] most of which, if you’ll bear with me here, are erasing the history of literature.

I’m especially interested in the cultural ownership and contribution to Dickinson’s poems in her lifetime and after her death, how they were, with good intention, heavily edited for reasons of propriety, to affect an exact rhyme, or to create a “sensible” metaphor,[ii] and how my erasing her poems is both part of that legacy of cultural ownership (not limited to her poems by any means) and plays with the idea of Dickinson’s reclusiveness and refusal to offer her work for publication, even at the guilt-laden behest of a contemporary of letters Helen Hunt Jackson: “It is a cruel wrong to your ‘day & generation’ that you will not give [the poems] light. … I do not think we have a right to with hold from the world a word or a thought any more than a deed, which might help a single soul.”[iii]

But what of the actual erasure of Emily Dickinson’s poems to “make room” as it were for my own poems, as an affirmation of my own self-worth and individuality that is at the heart of American poetry and cultural life? Isn’t that just a physical and very real form of the scenario that I just hypothetically sketched, a physical metaphor for a non-physical cultural operation (theoretically), and a very necessary one? Or is “Called Back” already obsolete like the desire to write poetry itself and like the outdated mode of communication it decorates (ahem, the telephone booth)? If language really is a valid medium for creating self worth, is erasing it an aggressive and murderous act, whether literally or symbolically?

As you are reading this, I’ll let you decide which essay you are not reading, which essay we are erasing together, you know, like trans-personally.