And now for today’s (optional) prompt! Erasure poetry — also known as blackout poetry — is written by taking an existing text and erasing or blacking out individual words. Here’s a great explainer with examples, and you’ll find another here. Some folks have written whole books of erasures/blackouts, including Chase Berggrun’s R E D (which is based on Dracula), Jen Bervin’s Nets (which is based on Shakespeare’s sonnets), and what is one of the grand-daddies of erasures as a form, Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (which is based on Paradise Lost). Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own erasure/blackout poem. You could use a page from a favorite book, a magazine, what have you. It can be especially fun to play with a book you don’t know, particularly one that deals with an unfamiliar topic. If you’d like to go that route, maybe you’ll find something of interest in the thousands of scanned books at the Internet Archive? Feel free to maintain the whitespace of the original text (as is traditional for erasures/blackouts . . . if anything can be called traditional about them) or to pluck words/phrases from your chosen source material and rearrange them.
This was a fun prompt. My first erasure poetry. I wish I had the time to upload images of the photocopied page. It's a mess.
I asked the husband to pick a page from Eleanor Catton's The Luminaries. I bought a copy of the novel a few years ago, but haven't managed to read it yet. So, the text on the page was new.
From page 390 of The Luminaries
My shade summoned to a shilling séance
I expect to evade, forestall time
to spy upon
a very lonely world—
unable to touch
or altar it
In New Zealand native tradition,
the soul, when it dies, becomes a star
Perhaps, I will
moleskin and serge
the prospect of panning for gold
not ready to begin
new life
This is stunning, Arti. I love the double meaning of "altar it."
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