William Gibson Disappears!

Agrippe, William Gibson’s self-erasing poem from 1992, has been archived online, at The Agrippe Files. The original book sported columns of DNA sequences matched with old-timey-style etchings, and came with diskette featuring a poem by Gibson which destroyed itself once the program was run. It’s all kind of hard to explain, so here’s the description from the site:

The Agrippa Files is a scholarly site that presents selected pages from the original art book; a unique archive of materials dating from the book’s creation and early reception; an emulation of Gibson’s included poem in its original born-and-die-digital form (it ran from a diskette once before encrypting itself into oblivion); a simulation of what the book’s intended “fading images” might have looked like; a video of the 1992 “transmission” of the work; a “virtual lightbox” for comparing and studying pages; full-text scholarly essays and interviews; an annotated bibliography of scholarship, press coverage, interviews, and other material; a detailed bibliographic description of the book; and a discussion forum.

Especially since there's been a lot of hullabaloo around erasure poetics in the last few years, the revival of Gibson’s contribution is a worthwhile and untimely intervention into a relevant practice. But instead of erasing a previously existing text with the intent of creating a “new” poem, the poetry of Gibson’s work consists in the erasure of the “new” poem itself. The fact that this was written in 1992 forces us to ask an urgent question: “why do most of today’s erasure poems simply read like run-of-the-mill post-language lyric poems, instead of taking on a form more proper to the procedure?” Zing.