The Art of Deleting: On Poetry and Erasure (Q&A)

This document registers the Q&A of the UCLA Information Studies Colloquium "The Art of Deleting: On Poetry and Erasure" by Álvaro Seiça. The talk presents recent outcomes connected to the research and book project “The Art of Deleting” (ARTDEL). ARTDEL is a 3-year project (2018-21) funded by the European Commission’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellowship and the Norwegian Research Council, at the University of Bergen, the University of California, Los Angeles, and the University of Coimbra. The use of material and graphic erasure in the composition and formal display of poems has a varied tradition during the 20th century and, most prominently, in the early 21st century. Marks of erasure in literary works can be traced back at least to Heinrich Heine’s poetical narrative Reisebilder (1827), in which the author denounces and parodies state censorship by mimicking the censors’ cuts. Yet, since then, are all writers, artists, and poets using erasure in the same way? An overview of this expanding visual and literary form suggests that there are often formalist or conceptual concerns with no political aims, but that a great number of poets and artists also highlight themes and practices of resistance and activism, by connecting erasure with censorship and surveillance. While the first part of the talk will contrast clusters of erasure poetics, the second part will present archival research related to how book censorship and erasure unfolded under the New State, the Portuguese corporatist and fascist regime of 1933-74. By searching the archives of the political police PIDE/DGS and the Censorship Commission, by inventorying, for the first time ever, the full card index of the Censorship Commission, and by unearthing part of the original books censored by the regime, it is now possible to better understand practices, motives, and objectives of material erasure that served the propaganda of Salazar and Caetano’s regime. Having the knowledge of legal and political documents, it is appropriate to ask whether contemporary poets are using erasure or not in relation to history via documentary forms. While that does not seem to be the case in Portugal, in the United States there has been an erasing impulse, especially after the 2000s, to use declassified documents and redaction as found material for new creative work. The talk concludes with reflections on how different ideologic regimes in the post-Second World War in the US, Portugal and China seek to identify common threats among writers on the grounds of national security, patriotism, political subversion, pornography, gender roles or morals.