Doris Crossed Out

North Easter Island Circle, Englewood, Florida

A common technique in visual poetry is cancellation, the process of writing, painting, or otherwise covering parts of a found text—and allowing other text, the text of this new visual poem, to shine through. The techniques and texts used vary with the poet.

One of the most famous contemporary practitioners of cancellation is Tom Phillips, a British artist, who has wrought multiple editions of his A Humument from the pages of the otherwise little known Victorian novel, A Human Document. Philips uses a wide variety of techniques to cancel out the text, many of them painting—and each piece of his remaining text usually is held together visually by a ribbon of white space leading from one to the next.

In the 1960s, the poet d.a. levy used a method of cancellation he called destructive writing by first collaging together found images and found and original text and then obliterating large sections of the text with swaths and puddles and oceans of black ink. His technique is one of the most dramatic forms of cancellation (second only to the rare total cancellation of a text), and examples of it appear (or disappear) in The Tibetan Stroboscope.

But our focus is Doris Cross’s col.umns. The dot between the l and the u in the title is actually a raised period that marks the break between two syllables in the word—just as dictionaries often do, because the text Cross crosses out is Webster’s Secondary School Dictionary from 1913. I own a copy of that book, and my book database tells me that it is a mere 23 centimeters tall and 17 centimeters wide (and that it cost me $1). It is a small book, and I’ve no idea how many of the pages Cross ended up transforming.

She did, however, appear to have worked on at least some of the pages in situ, so the resulting altered book is itself an example of book art, one I’d like to see in person. And one reason is that I’ve never seen good enough reproduction of its pages. The Light & Dust site produces a few pages in color, which allows us to see her sometimes Blakean use of color to shape the page, but the images are too small to read. The book col.umns reprinted about 40 columns or pages. Sometimes, a whole page is a single poem, and sometimes a single column is treated as a poem. This book reproduces the pages larger than original size, so we can read them, but the reproduction is a muddy grey; none of the color and none of the original clarity of the text remains. This book also provides only a glimpse into her whole work. About seven to ten of the images reproduced are different versions of the same page or column. Who knows how many books Cross produced or what her full oeuvre is.

As an accomplished cancellationist, Cross uses a number of techniques. She blanks out entire entries, or just a few lines or words, or just the occasional letter in a set of words. She cancels text by painting over it entirely, by painting over in such a way that some of the painted text remains legible. She cancels text by scribbling over it with pen, by carefully drawing a line through it, by drawing shapes and coloring them in. She is imaginative in these techniques, but Tom Phillips remains the master in that contest.

However, the resulting text—forget the visual element for a second—is more poetic, and therefore more affecting, than Phillips'. Her source text, of course, gives her an advantage over Phillips. She is using a dictionary, so she is guaranteed a rich variety of words—and each page comes complete with guidewords atop each column. These guidewords tell users of the dictionary how close they are to their chosen word, but for Cross they allow her a natural title for her poems. Also, unlike Phillips, she isn’t trying to tell a story, she isn’t trying to devise a novel (with characters and something akin to a plot). She is creating a series of poems. She has freedom.

Take this poem “Flagon,” which loses some of its force by being removed from its visual environment, but this still gives you a sense of the poetic nature of her work:

fixed



fastened

room




A barren plateau








—flag

form
tapering


shrill-sounding
holes and a mouth


stones

the flag
limp


fla.g


with

a lid

Those six lines in the middle of the poem always hit me: A barren plateau/—flag/
form/tapering/shrill-sounding/holes and a mouth. How wonderful that “flag” is in boldface, that “form” is in italics. How weird and wonderful are phrases like “A barren plateau” or “shrill-sounding/holes and a mouth.” Being a poet, rather than a novelist, Cross has the freedom to produce a text as enigmatic as a Sapphic fragment. And sometimes just as powerful

Cross, Doris. col.umns. Trike: San Francisco, 1982.

ecr. l’inf.