![]() Curiously, the polarity that is to some extent silenced by such works is that between novel and poem if Ezra Pound’s slogan “ dichten = condensare” holds any truth, the act of pruning back the language of the most prosaic text will always tend to turn it into something more like poetry. using a canonical one on which the new work will always be seen as commentary, homage, or critique. The other polarity is between using a little-known source text with few prior associations for most readers vs. erasure through removal (becoming an important visual element in itself, the white space of the page substitutes for most of Milton’s text in Radi Os). One polarity is erasure through superimposition (in A Humument, words are obscured by abstract visual elements) vs. These two books establish two of the genre’s constitutive polarities. Subtractive composition has become a genre of its own in recent decades, its early major examples (in English at least) being the British artist Tom Phillips’s A Humument, derived from an otherwise forgotten late Victorian novel called A Human Document-the first of several versions of Phillips’s book was published in 1970-and the American poet Ronald Johnson’s poem Radi Os, distilled from Paradise Lost and published in 1977. Modern authors, perhaps under the influence of the Duchampian concept of the readymade, have been using their erasers in ways the old Roman could never have imagined. “Erase often, if you hope to write something worth rereading,” quoth Horace. ![]()
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