Routes to Erasure/Collage Poems

This morning I've fallen down a bit of a rabbit hole.  Dave Bonta's Poetry Blog Digest for this week led me to a blog post by Sarah J. Sloat which led me to some of her more recent publications of erasure collage poems.  She's been working with Thoreau's Walden, which made me think about doing something similar with Shelley's Frankenstein.

I decided to look for a cheap copy of Frankenstein, which led me down another rabbit hole.  It would probably be easier to use the copy machine, the way I did for an earlier project, where I used the book Megatrends (for more on that process, see this blog post).

Here is the poem alone, before blacking out passages:

Here is the poem with blacked out passages

I woke up thinking about Frankenstein, about ways I might teach my British Lit class even if I'm off campus for some of the teaching days.  I woke up thinking about online discussion posts, but now I'm thinking about a collage/erasure poem.  Now I'm thinking about a wide range of projects that could use erasure and collage.  It's an interesting way of thinking about assessment:  choose a page, make an erasure poem, add collage elements, and write analysis showing how your creation shows understanding of the work.

I spent much of yesterday grading, and much of the grading was English 102 final exams, which had students write about what went well, what could be improved, and one suggestion.  I was surprised by how many people loved the quilting bee that I created (more information in this blog post).  Even counting for the possibility/probability that some of them included this thinking that's what I wanted to hear, the enthusiasm seemed genuine, and it was an enthusiasm that I didn't always perceive on the day of the event.  Many of them said they wished they could have more hands-on ways of learning that way, less lecturing/discussing.

I also wonder if I could have them act out a scene, in lieu of writing about a piece of literature.  I keep thinking about last week's experiment with the final exam being more oral than written, and I wonder if I could create more opportunities like that.  I'm always on the lookout for assessment that's more genuine, more creative, and less able to be done completely by AI.  

I hadn't thought about collage/erasure poems as a way of doing that.  Let me tuck it away for next year.  As of right now, my grades are turned in, and my teaching work for Spartanburg Methodist College is done.