A Gallery of poems torn and reworked from various source texts.

Class visit 10/29/2019

These are beautiful and brilliant works, each of them from all of you. Thank you so much for allowing me to work together with your class; it was a great privilege. If any of you have or come up with any further erasure poems, send them on anytime to me at jasonzuzga@gmail.com, and I’ll gladly add them to this gallery. Feel free to take any of the persona poems that you read for yesterday’s class and give them the treatment, finding a persona within the persona. The incredible flexibility of language allows for such rigorous experiment!

Here’s the link to the extensive Tom Phillips’s A HUMUMENT website, just in case you’d like to look around further (there’s a slide show of the first, second, and third editions, as we glimpsed in class, and even audio of Phillips reading the entire sixth edition): http://www.tomphillips.co.uk/humument.

Thanks again!!

All my best, Jason

“Like most projects that end up lasting a lifetime my version had its germ in idle play . . . At first I merely scored out unwanted words with ink leaving some (often too many) to stand and the rest more or less readable . . . The first page I finished in 1966 was p33. Reworking it I have incorporated part of the original as a memorial to the start of things, now burned and pasted on to its successor . . . Serendipity is the best collaborator.” –Tom Phillips