Here is a perfunctory try at this.

Nature Out of Chaos

Nature rounded out of chaos —
painted plains, or valleys, drowned.

The hill is streaked with lava flows.

Water accumulates in hollows,
evaporating where mountains dry.

Dark, bitter, a crust of lies along
the marsh has neither beauty nor
the scar's redeeming desert edges.

Terrible. Grand. Depend upon
slow, thirsty soil. Find the winds
and breathless cries that told of it.

Original: "The Land of Little Rain" by Mary Austin
http://erasures.wavepoetry.com/erasures.php?sourceid=2

Nope. I had never heard of it either, before that thread, Jayne. I will admit, however, it definitely put a bee in my bonnet!

Martin, I will certainly take on your poem and see what I can see, as time permits. Thanks for contributing.

I hereby offer my erasure from the same source as yours, Curtis.

I took what I saw (in your poem) as a person with some sort of obsessive disorder, claustrophobia, and/or legitimate fear of some actual impending problem or disaster, and imposed the obsessive disorder onto inanimate objects: an actual box, and a door: a kind of box in that it has a boxy appearance, or has a box-like geometric shape and composition.

~~~

Boxes

The door is a box
just outside the
box

The box found that
it was placed
with the other to
support the box, and the
momentum of their weight
against
each other in their panic-stricken efforts to escape

added weight
to the shock they had produced to break their way
through


the box,
which lay clearly visible
was, however,

waiting
outside of
the other

box, the spot where
originated and appeared two

boxes.


[Original: History of the Gatling Gun Detachment by John Henry Parker - http://erasures.wavepoetry.com/erasu...p?sourceid=16]


(One major problem is I didn't have a full-stop available after the word 'through'. I don't think a strophe break helps either.)

Martin,

I'll admit one thing straight away:

I thought the original was a poem.

I found your poem to be interesting in and of itself, and probably would have had I not known it was an erasure poem. The only difficulty I face as a reader is that I wonder upon whom your images 'depend', and who is compelled to 'find', unless that be the reader(s) themselves?

Martin,

I really like your poem. I like it better than the original text, by quite a bit.

I will say, making some comparison between what you have done and what Bill and I have done, that your poem in its first half is much closer to the original text in meaning and description than ours. In some respects, the original's reliance on highly descriptive images may have forced your hand. I think that looking at the way the language is chosen might offer some clues, too:

The original starts,

This is the nature of that country. There are hills, rounded, blunt, burned, squeezed up out of chaos,

So broadly, "this is the nature" and then a multifaceted description of that nature, which you abridged to

Nature rounded out of chaos —

That is a broader statement, because it is saying that all nature is rounded out of chaos. But it's still very close to the original.

The original says,

The hill surface is streaked with ash drift and black, unweathered lava flows.

And you abridge that to

The hill is streaked with lava flows.

It would have been possible to make a further leap and say, with just these two lines, "This is the country of chaos, unweathered." —but at the moment I don't know how exactly that could be turned into a political poem or something else.

I think it's in the second half of your poem where your poem really takes off and becomes something that is not quite in the original.

But, having said all this, I'm not sure there is any specific set of parameters for what constitutes "good erasure poetry." I think the answer to that is yet to be determined. I did like your poem and would rather read it than the original.

I agree, and I also prefer Martin's distillation to the original.

Hi Williamb and Curtis,

I found both of your readings of my erasure fascinating!

The questions you had, Williamb, about the last two sentences, which are both imperative, made me pause and think. And I can't really answer those questions.

I pretty much did this in a kind of impetuous flow of erasing, but with certain conscious decisions as I went along. One of them being to try to get all the lines into tetrameter. And, perhaps, to end up with some kind of loose story or at least a certain consistent flavor.

One turn in the poem happens at "crust of lies." And then I deleted some words before and after the apostrophe in "scar's" to be able to use it in the word.

It's kind of fun trying out such little tricks, isn't it?

I'll see if I can comment soon on yours, William, as well as your, Curtis. I do like both of your quite different, but interesting, poems.

Martin

All is well, my friend(s). Bill (1 among many here at the Sphere) is unscathed, and Curtis is awesome.

Peace, Love, and all that good stuff...

Excellent, Martin. Can you believe I didn't even notice that your poem was metrical? Shame on me, I should have dug deeper, had a keener ear.

Your poem is really quite good. It may have already won the non-existent prize this thread doesn't have on offer.

;)