Erasure Poetry Drill (And Amusement)
 

A fan of the poet Joe Wenderoth, I happened to stumble upon the web site for Wave Books, publisher of his third book of poetry and his forthcoming fourth book of poetry, while doing a search for poems I might use in a blog post I'm planning.

Wave Books, I discovered, has a section on its web site for erasure poetry drills—really, a resource for doing some erasure poetry. Multiple source texts are listed at this link: http://erasures.wavepoetry.com/sources.php . You can click on a source, and you'll be taken to a page with that source text and be able to click on individual words and punctuation to "erase" portions of the text, creating your own erasure poem.

Because some interest in the subject of erasure poetry has been expressed on Eratosphere, I thought this would be a good chance to examine the process in more detail.

For this drill—and/or for amusement—please use one of the source texts listed at the Wave Books site to create an erasure poem, and post your poem here. Please note which source text was used, but do not include the source text here—either a note about the text or a link to that text on Wave Books's site would be best.

Comments about the process used on particular erasure poems posted here, the choices made, and general observations on creating erasure poems—especially relating to the efforts posted here—are welcome. But broad polemical arguments about erasure poetry should probably be reserved for the recent General Talk thread in which the subject already appeared or a new thread on General Talk specifically to address the issue.

I'll start things off with an erasure poem I made using the Wave Books site.

This Juncture

This juncture, the old
door, is a box
verifying just outside
the river,
and the box
had already taken up
its weight around him.
The momentum of the crowd
of panic-stricken men coming
and great presence of mind
had produced
the door. It was
the work of the river,
the water, the bubble
which lay clearly visible
only at this point
outside the basement. Just as
the door had originated,
water at once flooded
to be near,
as a measure of precaution.
 
 

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

I think this is a good idea, Curtis. I hope this thread will draw attention.

I forgot to mention, Curtis, I will look at your poem and let you know what I think of it, as time permits.

Anyone who is tempted to use one of my poems, please erase ALL the words.

William,

I don't think we need to replicate the General Talk thread here.

Let's please focus on drills and amusement, using this thread for those purposes. The way that many contest-related threads are used: post the results of experiments using the source texts linked in the opening post, comment on those, and not hash out broad polemical arguments pro- or con- the subject of erasure poetry. I don't expect that we can avoid all broader implications of the process, here, but I also don't expect minds will be completely changed regarding the polemical stances toward erasure poetry, and such a replication of the arguments already made in the GT thread will only derail the drill here.

Sorry! I leapt before I looked, yet again! My sincere apologies...

Noted. Other stuff deleted.

Curtis,

From your erasure of that bit of prose I get a sense of one man, since you leave the word 'him', taking great pains to separate himself from others, or from some impending disaster which is either real or only imagined by 'him'. I am not sure if the water words, such as 'river', 'water', (perhaps even 'bubble'?) 'flooded', are used symbolically or literally.

I wonder why you only use 'him' one time, and if your meaning might have been clearer had you used it again at some strategic point.

Positive things about your poem are the sense of paranoia, or actual danger, of some definite threat, and how you finish the poem with this threat reimposing itself, without resolve. As a poem, were I to judge it without knowing it was an erasure, I would rate it as pretty decent, albeit enigmatic. Sort of reminiscent of David Ignatow, if only for the poem's physical attributes as well as its decidedly "unpoetic", or prosaic, style. It also reminds me a wee bit of Henry Reed. I'm thinking of his "Naming of Parts", a poem steeped in prosaic detail which, while ostensibly obscuring or distracting attention from the horror of war, actually serves to highlight and draw attention to it. Your poem, by its use of a kind of procedural list (along with a few well-chosen phrases like 'panic-stricken'), could—and I am only saying could—be seen as highlighting one man's obsessive behavior, his dire mental condition, or a real impending problem or disaster: or a compelling, imaginative mixture of both.

I must be the ONLY person who had never heard of "erasure poetry" until that GT thread! :eek:

Excuse me while I go and cringe in a corner :o

Jayne

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.

;)

Interesting topic/thread, Curtis. I've enjoyed reading the erasures and the commentary. Here's my attempt:

The History of Insects

Wonder and astonishment yet
at first thought struck.


[erasure is from the text The History of Insects, author unknown. http://erasures.wavepoetry.com/erasures.php?sourceid=23 .

eta: Here's another one from the same text that adheres to the rules/keeps the word order.

The Least Creature We Can Imagine

At first thought yet when
we come to reflect we shall
be struck with wonder.

Curtis, thanks for the fun challenge.

Both your poem and William's poem make my head spin. I haven't read the original text yet, so I don't know what you've erased. I'll do that soon.

Martin, your poem is really good. I did read the original text. Nice erasing!

Dean, too much erasing, imo.


This is my attempt from the text-- Buried Cities

Vesuvius

Thundered and spouted
steam and fire leap out of lava
and houses and fields.

Pompeii in time:

The people. An ox.
Casts of ashes
bellowing.


Donna

Donna, one thing I noticed when trying this out on the Wave site is how the exercise tended to push me toward some odd and unusual syntactical constructions, disjunctive images, etc., which is something I note in your erasure, all of which I think really serve you well (and/or you serve really well) for the most part. The sentence fragments feel right too, in concert with the subject matter.

Not Nice
 

I found this very difficult and frustrating, started a few of the Wave texts and abandoned them. The only one that I went through with was this. I find the result disturbing, but it has a dark kind of logic.

Nice

No I wasn’t.
This town was full of women, they said,
“It will be nice for you”
They really didn’t mean anything.
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.
If some of the women
knew how I feel
they would put me out.

It settled here years ago
and has been hatching ever since:
set back with wings spread,
hovering,
to the young, long-legged
out of the nests.

Off to xxxxxxxxxx them.

From The Melting of Molly.

No, Jayne, you're not the only one. I can quite see how a thread like this might be considered a "drill" (cf. "dentist"), but an "amusement"? Fortunately, I'm too old for my mind to be still capable of boggling.

Is there room for me in your corner?

No one can
see



me.



In this erasure of your post, I hear you, Brian.

Deletedxxxx

Deletedxxxxx

let

deed

(This is an erasure poem from Rob's two previous poems. I find it incredibly moving in its acceptance of the fact that what is done is done, and that we should live our lives in the full recognition that we cannot change the past, nor the behaviour of others, but must come to terms with the world as it is.)

Steve, I tried for a while at the Melting of Molly-- I don't know how you managed to come up with something that holds together. Yours has a Stephen King town feel to it.

Curtis and William I went back and read History of the Gatling Gun Detachment. Now I can see where the weird, scary trapped in a box in a box came from.

Donna

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