Erasure Experiments

Yesterday, I experimented with an erasure poem:

Last week, I saw this erasure poem here by Sarah J. Sloat (source text from a twitter exchange with her:  "this is a page from William Golding's novel 'Pincher Martin,' about a shipwreck":

I loved the simplicity of it.  I love her poems that combine erasure and collage, but my collaging skills often leave me frustrated:  finding the right image, cutting it correctly, gluing so that the image stays stuck to the page, but the page stays flat. 

Yesterday, after spending too much time staring at screens at work, I remembered this erasure poem, and reached for my bookshelves at work.  I decided to work with Bill McKibben's The Age of Missing Information.  I flipped to a random page, and I printed it on the copy machine and then enlarged it. I made a few extra copies, since I may keep playing with a text if the first approach goes well. 

So far, when I do an erasure poem, I look for the words first and then figure out what to do next.  Here are the words I saved.  Let me write them here and see if they work as a poem:

piece of land

groundwater's shadow

growing

logic to the layout

tiny pond

tell their inhabitants

As I looked at the words, I decided to use blue and green markers to strike through the rest of the text.  Here's how it looked at the end of the session:

I may decide to do more with it, or I may decide to do a different draft with a clean copy or I may decide to move along to something else.

After my session of drawing horizontal lines in blue and green, I felt refreshed--hurrah for creativity.  I did this at the end of the day, when my poetry brain wouldn't have been able to create something if I just stared at a blank page.  It was good to have something creative to do, even when I couldn't create something brand new out of nothing.