Phases of erasure
My first experiment with writing erasure poetry happened last October at the NorthWords altered pages workshop I wrote about here. Jess from Terrace Public Library handed out excerpts from Margaret Atwood’s Hag-Seed and invited us to either black out words with a Sharpie or circle words to create a poem. I circled.
As always with this type of exercise, it was incredible to me how each of us created something so different. My poem had a distinctly cynical flavour:
twisted bastard,
he’d trusted
grief
too painful still
so they kept
the most inventive
theatre
inspired the best
understood nothing
I really enjoyed creating a poem this way, and I’ve been meaning to try it again, but I haven’t yet. Some people (hello, Leona) might call this procrastination. I prefer to think of it like Einstein did (as explained here by Merilyn Simonds—thanks to Carin Makuz at Matilda Magtree for pointing me to this post): gathering information while being alert to new relationships.
When my daily poem arrived this morning, I immediately recognized a gold standard of erasure poetry: Phases of Erasure: A Soldier’s Journey, by Bill Glose. Please take a look and then tell me—is that not amazing?
Now that I’ve gathered information on how I want to write erasure poetry, all that’s left to do is … write it!
Stay tuned!
If you feel inspired, try it yourself and share the results with us.
Leave a Reply