Free downloads [PDFs]: 1664, 1665, 1666, 1667, 1668, 1669

From January 1, 2013 to May 31, 2022, I made erasure poems from every entry in the 17th-century Diary of Samuel Pepys, posting the results to Via Negativa. I used HTML to gray out the words I don’t use without completely erasing them, but I also posted versions of each poem as stand-along texts—true erasure poems. Which also sometimes find their way into videopoems, because why not?

Why this particular source material? Its language is admirably concrete, with recurring words and turns of phrase shaped by the exigencies of Pepys’ original shorthand. In thought and content it stands at the beginning of the modern era: the first truly confessional piece of literature by a man equally fascinated by religion and science, and whose curiosity encompassed everything from music-making and theater to mathematics, accounting, politics, fashion, and carnal pleasures. And last but not least, the 1899 Wheatley edition is available online in a website that is really a model for how to present literature on the web. It was my desire to read it day by day that led to this project, which I view not as erasure but as discovery—a kind of deep (mis)reading. Pepys was a sexual predator and an architect of British colonialism who personally profited off the slave trade, so any less than an engaged, critical reading of the diary, in this day and age, would be irresponsible. From a secret diary, these are the secret poems hidden even from the author himself.

I began compiling the erasures into free ebooks in 2017 (links above). Browse the Pepys Diary Erasure Project archive.

Here are some additional video/film versions of my erasures — two more by me, Carnival and Arsonist; Anatomy by Marie Craven; and 5 X Samuel Pepys by Marc Neys aka Swoon.)

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If you’re a filmmaker, musician, or visual artist, you’re welcome to use my texts however you like, as long as you give attribution and don’t restrict the freedoms of others to do the same with your resulting work. Like everything I write, the Pepys erasure texts are licensed for remix under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.