darkness, chapter 1 (little red leaves, 2009)
In Darkness, Yedda Morrison erases—or, significantly, “whites out”—chapter 1 of Conrad’s Heart Of Darkness leaving behind only the words and phrases that reference the natural world. Morrison’s aim is not to comment on the original, but to cull or reframe the remains: “luminous estuary/brooding gloom/sea.” In this brilliantly dark contribution to the emerging fields of conceptual writing and erasure poetics, Morrison gives us (back) our natural world—plucked violently, sadly, beautifully from the “master work.” In Darkness, the reader will discover for herself what is being borrowed, plundered, recycled, purloined. - Robert Fitterman
Yedda Morrison | Darkness | Little Red Leaves | 2009
The first chapter from an edition of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness with everything but references to the natural world whited out. Like most works of conceptual writing, the premise at first sounds mechanical, but what counts as “the natural world” is far from self-evident, and opens onto a range of philosophical and ethical questions. A lesser writer would have been paralyzed by indecision, their bottle of correction fluid drying to a brittle pallid skin before the little brush could set to paper (or the photoshop tool mouse to screen, as the case may be). - Craig Dworkin
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