Brian, were your poem to appear on Non-Met, I might suggest revising to:

B

Let

deed

be

deleted.

You may be right, Curtis. But don't you think it would be somewhat verbose?

There are so many levels of irony here I'm going to have to go and have a little lie down.

At first I wanted to go and cringe in a corner with embarrassment; I thought I ought to have heard of this "form", but now I want to go and cringe in a corner because of it!

What is the point of it, exactly? :confused: (If there is one, it escapes me, sorry.)

Jayne

PS. I've had a request from Brian and A N Other so far to join me in my corner; it may get crowded in there!

Jayne, I get it. It's pretty obvious that you should delete the word sorry.

The point is amusement, and I am uncringingly amused by it.


Donna

I quite like the versions that are made by repeating a single line over and over again and whiting out particular letters. I don't know if this has a particular name. It is arguably little more than a jeu d'esprit even in the hands of an expert practitioner, but can be fun. Wendy Cope did an excellent one based on a line from Rilke, but I can't remember what it's called (I'm sure someone else will), and there's a deceptively simple one by Bob Cobbing where every word is derived from 'THATCHER'. You can see this here if anyone is interested http://writing.upenn.edu/library/Cob...ndals_1985.pdf (page 14)

For me, the point is seeing what may be the benefits and limitations of such an approach, and how such an approach may be useful or not. The approach is used, already, even if not so much so far by those who frequent these parts.

I think we already have some indication.

I think Steve's comment hits at one point: "I found this very difficult and frustrating."

We have Martin's example, which in its first half follows rather closely the original text.

And then we have what Dean said, "the exercise tended to push me toward some odd and unusual syntactical constructions, disjunctive images, etc." I think we've seen some of this pressure manifest in different ways. In my example, I trended toward highly figurative language—an approach that, I think, is usually difficult to pull off well even without having only so many words at my disposal. I do think that taking an easy way out and writing fumbling or incoherent syntax, grammar, images, and so forth, is not the best way to go—one could imagine writing a bunch of words or phrases on pieces of paper, putting them in a hat, shaking, taking one piece of paper out at a time, and writing these down in order....Which, it turns out, some poets seem to do anyway. But I think that the goal in an erasure poem, or my own particular goal, would be to write something as coherent as any other poem one would want to write. (I don't mean here that enigmatic approaches or other non-linear types of expression are horribly "incoherent"—only that gibberish is too easy.)

And then we have Brian's excellent example of taking the very easy path of picking out only a couple words, maybe, that can be thought of in combination in a myriad of ways, and calling that the poem.

So, that's what I think this thread is about. And, the experiments can be fun, too. Even if not everyone finds it fun.

Edit: I haven't listed the benefits here, quite; but the challenge of finding that coherence, and that something new, might be productive. Forcing the mind out of normal habits of thinking.

I found the exercise frustrating too, and ended up after a six line rhymed attempt going to the hat method. A total whiteout crossed my mind as well, but I thought someone probably already did that (erase yellow smile thing here).

What I was trying to do was pit the boxes against one another: the three dimensional, actual box, and the door, which according to the box's POV is two dimensional, and therefore strange and forbidding, right off the bat. I see the door closed and the box up against it, maybe to keep the door from opening on its own? I had a bedroom door with no lock in an apartment for several years, and I did just that: I placed a heavy box full of books right against the door, so that if someone (some drunken Tortilla Flat kind of pseudo-friend, not Mexican but as white and trashy as I was at that time) should come barging in on me I'd at least have some noise or a second's hesitation to warn me of the intrusion.

I took the cue from Curtis's erasure, which looked to me like the thoughts of a mentally unbalanced, obsessive person, or normal person aware of a real threat, and whittled away with the idea that the actual box is feeling threatened by the door, which it regards as a bigger, therefor scarier kind of box. It's certainly a stretch and I don't intend the poem as a serious erasure. I wouldn't post it on my bloggie or think of it as a real poem (so I say now...). It was part of the experiment Curtis invited us to join in.

I appreciate your thoughts about it, though! There is definitely a sense of claustrophobia there. I am wickedly claustrophobic, and have been since birth. My mother tells me I would stiffen up in my car-seat when going under a bridge or underpass, and I'd panic when she tried to get a T-shirt over my head. I don't even wear watches or rings: too binding. No likey. I can tolerate them for a while, but inevitably have to stop putting them on.

From Steve Bucknell's post:

Steve,

This has a haunting, creepy, predatorial feel to it. I haven't read the source text, but will get to it soon. It's interesting that your poem and my flopper in non-met should have common attributes. Or am I reading this all wrong?

I don't quite understand this part:

God didn’t want to see,
not caring what happened,
so he found use
in some other place.
I feel that He is going
whatever happens.

I wonder if there's a reference to the idea I've heard from several Christians that "God cannot look upon sin"? I've always been puzzled by any sentence uttered by any person of faith, in any religion worldwide, which speaks of what God can't do. My concept of God, as whacky as it is, does not allow for anything God can't do.

Maybe this is the Deist's conception of God, the Prime Mover who creates the universe and then removes His hand, having no concern or intervention in it? I could never grasp this concept of an unconcerned, hands-off Creator, or Great Spirit. What father (and God is traditionally conceived as the prime Father (including Mother for me, since I can't see God having a gender) would make trillions of children and then sit back and watch, without some sort of guidance or intervention?

That being said, granted: human history is a bloodbath, and one's faith is challenged the more one learns about our cruel and brutal past. I've just begun Stendhal's The Abess of Castro, and by the middle of the 1st chapter my generally positive outlook on our history, particularly the Italian Renaissance, is already withering, drying up, cold, bleak.

Don't ask me about the Dungeons of Venice. If there is a Hell, and if my whacky concept of God and my mouthing off merits me a trip downstairs, I fear that's exactly where I'll wind up. I shudder just thinking of the poor souls who were put there.

The last line of your poem sends the point home that yeah, not nice at all. Dark, dark, dark.

Bill