[Steve Bucknell]

Bill,

Your explication of your erasure poem is dramatic and involving:

"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."

The erasure poem you make is dull, abstract, undramatic, uninvolving and opaque. This explication, the memory it touches on is the stuff you need to work with: vivid raw material and drama which communicates powerful feeling. That's where the poetry is.

Steve