Week Four

Week Four: The Power of Limitation

This week we’re going to play with how eliminating choice can open up possibility.  Find five pieces of writing – poems, short prose pieces, even an article.  Through a process sometimes called erasure, we’re going to mine an existing piece of writing for things hidden within.

Make several copies and then without thinking about the content of the piece of writing, begin searching for what you can find within the writing.  Here are some techniques:

- using a pen, define a meandering bubble that puts words and phrases together as you move down or up the lines,

- do the same thing, but cross out as you go along the words you are not using,

- look just at the ends or the beginnings of the lines and see if you can find new ideas there that have nothing to do with the content of the original piece, but that somehow express something from within you.

Feel free to chop up words, or join them across gaps to create new words. The purpose here is to find suprising juxtapositions of words, images, ideas, sounds.  Sometimes even just one such discovery -- a verb-adverb combination you'd never thought of, for example -- can be used as a jumping off point for a new piece of work.

Here is an example of some very creative erasures by poet Mary Ruefle that also make use of pictures and drawings:

http://www.gwarlingo.com/2012/the-sunday-poem-mary-ruefle/

See this astonishing example of a poet mining her own poems, and using animation to great effect. As you click through each subpage of the poems, they fall apart and reconfigure to create new things:

http://www.conduit.org/online/buchanan/buchanan.html

Here’s an example from my own efforts.  In bold are the words I captured inside James Harms’s poem “20^th Century Boy”:

20^th Century Boy

It’s true, the cure has come through, though we can’t

afford it: sometimes the music mistakes us

for instruments, sometimes not. And the girl

from another planet, who once said, “You’ve got me

in your pocket,” she isn’t really here, though the silence

that surrounds her is enough to drop us through

sidewalks and subway grates, to the cracked river curving

away into darkness. They say a lamplit face is perfect

until we try to explain what we’ve seen. But the truth is,

it’s easier to look without seeing than say anything at all.

My poem:

Come, music, 

not silence, 

to drop us

through the darkness. 

Say anything at all.

Again, post a few of your "discovered" works. Post some comments on others' work you find intriguing.