[William A. Baurle]

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.