Derek Henderson - Thus &: An Erasure of Ted Berrigan’s The Sonnets

£8, if p then q, March 2011 (88 pages)

ISBN 978-0-9558641-8-6

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Thus & is a systematic erasure of Ted Berrigan’s 1964 collection The Sonnets. In his original sequence, Berrigan frequently and famously used repeated and/or reconfigured phrases, lines, and entire poems throughout. The current project seeks to uncover the “phantom poems” (in Alice Notley’s phrase) by erasing each word that occurs more than once in the original sonnet sequence. The only words that appear in Thus & are those that are typographically unique in The Sonnets. Thus, since “Carol” appears seven times in the original text, it has been erased, while “CAROL,” which appears in all-caps only once, has been retained.

This project has an online companion concordance to The Sonnets.