C.IAS Lecture - Mashid Mayar

“Erasure Poetry”

Mashid Mayar

Abstract:

Erasure poetry, a practice that creates poems by removing or obscuring portions of an existing text, operates as a “document-poem”: a work that is simultaneously poetry and document, lyric utterance and archival residue. In this figuration, erasure is a multilayered, multiauthored stack of texts, with the original document preceding and persisting beneath the poem that overwrites it. Thus, exactly because it stages a dual encounter with the legible and the illegible, I posit that a close, cross-generic reading of erasure must attend to the uneasy proximity and awkward coexistence of these textual layers within a single shared space. I explore these dynamics in Solmaz Sharif’s “Dear Salim” poems (from her award-winning collection Look), where erasure offers a curious reconfiguration of a particular type of source text: rather than erasing a preexisting document, these poems reverse the genre’s usual temporality in which the document appears as a retroactive effect of the erasure, conjured by the poem that seems to efface it. There, erasure recalibrates poetry as method, enacting and questioning processes of archival extraction and documentary diffraction.

Bio:

Mahshid Mayar [ she / her ] is Assistant Professor of American Studies at the University of Innsbruck, where she works on the intersections of literature and history, with particular attention to race, racialization and the cultural operations of the U.S. empire. Her second-book project, entitled  Erasure as Otherwise—Poetics, Politics, Performance, interrogates how the political pervades the poetic and the poetic manifests the political in twenty-first-century erasure poetry. Mahshid is the principal investigator of the research project W( )oles and ( )holes: Politically Engaged Erasure Poetry in Twenty-First-Century United States, funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).