The Ms of M y Kin

This title is printed to order. This book may have been self-published. If so, we cannot guarantee the quality of the content. In the main most books will have gone through the editing process however some may not. We therefore suggest that you be aware of this before ordering this book. If in doubt check either the author or publisher’s details as we are unable to accept any returns unless they are faulty. Please contact us if you have any questions.

If you write out The Poems of Emily Dickinson and erase some of the letters very neatly and precisely, you can get to The ms of m y kin - the manuscript of my kin, as it were; the manuscript of my family. It might also be said to be the manuscript of my kind. The practice of erasure was most famously accomplished (and perhaps invented) by the British artist Tom Phillips in his book A Humument (an erasure of a Victorian novel titled A Human Document) and later, by the American poet Ronald Johnson, who erased Milton’s Paradise Lost into a book called Radi os. In Phillips’s books-he did more than one version of A Humument-the artist created paintings over each page of the novel, reserving only certain words that told a different story than did the original work. (A new character, called Toge, emerged from the word together, for example.) Johnson, a poet, simply removed the words he did not wish to use as if whiting them out-the remaining words stood in the same relationship to each other as they did in the original poem. (Janet Holmes)