Prompt: Erasures

Blackout poem by Chris Lott using a page from
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Erasure poetry, sometimes known as blackout poetry, is a form of found poetry wherein a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or whites out a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new work from what remains. The new poem probably does not carry the same meaning as the original text. Oftentimes, it conveys quite an opposite meaning.

Erasure poetry is simple. Pick a text to erase, such as a magazine or newspaper story, famous poems, a passage from a novel, or maybe from a text ad. For our call this month, I recommend using no more than a page, and perhaps just a paragraph or two.

I have done blackout poetry by literally taking a black marker to the original. The resulting text looks like those redacted classified documents we sometimes see from the coverage of government proceedings. 

Besides creating new meaning in the remaining text, the page can also have a visual look with the gaps. That is not a requirement and at times I think it looks like the poem has holes, so simply making line or stanza breaks for the erased text will suffice. 

Doris Cross is thought to be one of the first to employ the erasure technique in poetry with her 1965 “Dictionary Columns.”  

There are examples of far more ambitious erase poetry. Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os is a revision of the first four books of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. I picked up a library copy of Jen Bervin’s Nets which uses Shakespeare's sonnets as primary source texts. The ms of my kin by Janet Holmes uses the poems of Emily Dickinson as a source. M. NourbeSe Philip created the political Zong! using as its source the legal text from a case against Gregson, a company that owned the ship Zong on which 150 Africans were massacred.

Tracy K. Smith has written several erasure poems, including "Declaration" which is drawn from the Declaration of Independence) in which she shows the places where erasures have occurred with blank spaces. Listen to the poet read her erasure poem and without the page before you with its white space, it sounds like an original work. And in fact, it is. Then read the poem.

I am also including two short poems of my own as examples of erasure without the blackouts or white spaces using only breaks to indicate the gaps. 

NOTE that for your submission, you must include a note below your title indicating the original text used.

THE REASON
(from Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason)

To the happiness of man:
infidelity 

not believing,
or disbelieving

professing to believe
what one does not believe

priests and conjurors
are of the same trade

UNIVERSITY OF OZ
(from an advertisement for an online diploma mill)

Obtain a prosperous future,
money earning power,
and the admiration of all.

Diplomas from prestigious
non-accredited universities
based on your present knowledge

No required tests,
classes, books, or interviews.
Life experience

Bachelors, Masters, MBAs,
and Doctorates
available in the field of your choice.

No one is turned down.
Confidentiality assured.
CALL NOW

receive your diploma
it pays
within days

       by Kenneth Ronkowitz

Submission Deadline: March 31, 2023

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Ekphrastic Challenge: Art Inspiring Poetry

Photo by Una Laurencic

We're away from our computers for a few days but we're reading your final submissions for the next issue and will post them next week. In the meantime, if you're looking for something to write, Rattle magazine offers a monthly Ekphrastic Challenge.

Rattle is following a long tradition of poetry responding to visual art. Poets Online took up its own poems from art with William Carlos Williams and ekphrasis for Edward Hopper with Victoria Chang and Edward Hirsch challenge, if you want some examples.

You can go to Rattle's page every month to find a new piece of art to inspire your poetry. You’ll have one month to write and submit your poems. Each month, two winners—one chosen by the artist and the other by Rattle’s editor—will receive online publication and $100 each.

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Finding Father's Love Letters Again

I was recently notified that a poem of mine titled "My Father's Love Letters" would be in the forthcoming issue of the Paterson Literary Review. It's not a new poem. I wrote it originally in 2000 from a very early prompt on the Poets Online website. 

As I go back and look at some of the first pages in our archive of 300+ prompts, I find that those early ones often surprise me.

Here was that prompt:

Imagine you have discovered a packet of your father's love letters. It might be easier to imagine love letters written by your mother, but, no - these are your father's love letters. How would they sound? Were they to your mother or someone else? Were they ever mailed?

Our model poem for this prompt was Yusef Komunyakaa's poem "My Father's Love Letters." The links on the old page needed to be fixed. That is probably true for other links on the old archived issues. I did find his poem on another website and also an audio recording by Yusef reading that poem.

The older archive pages were in a simpler format and often need some maintenance which is an ongoing process for the site. In this case, there were only five poems posted and we didn't get as many submissions in the beginning as we do now. The prompts were much shorter at the beginning and there was no blog where we extended the prompt.

POETS ONLINE started in 1998 as an e-mail exchange with four poets who met at a weeklong poetry writing workshop. Taking turns and suggesting a prompt idea, we took a week and then e-mailed our poems to each other. As more poets joined the group, it became an awkward mailing process, and POETS ONLINE, the website was created. By early 1999, a mailing list was created to remind people to check the latest prompt & poems and that has grown to hundreds of subscribers.

It wasn't until 2003 that I bought the domain poetsonline.org. The blog appeared in October 2005 and by then we already had seven years of prompts and poems. The blog now had almost 800 posts and goes well beyond just the prompts, and has had almost 705,000 visits.

I know from emails that a number of teachers use the archive of pat prompts as a resource for students to get ideas and models for their writing (poetry and otherwise). That pleases me. Of course, anyone can use the older prompts for inspiration whether for not they ever submit to the site to be published in the next issue.

Visit our website at poetsonline.org

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Small Poems

Small poems often get short shrift. Basho and Issa are great poets of the haiku form, but I can't imagine them on stage at a poetry festival reading their poems for a half hour. Poor old haiku is often relegated to being an exercise for children in school. It looks easy, but good haiku is not easy to write. 

3:00 AM

Only my hand
is asleep,
but it's a start.

  - Billy Collins

I have always written some poems that are short. I also like reading short poems. Billy Collins says that "Whenever I pick up a new book of poems, I flip through the pages looking for small ones. Just as I might have trust in an abstract painter more if I knew he or she could draw a credible chicken, I have faith in poets who can go short." 

Elegy

I have turned over
all fifty-two cards
on the kitchen table.

Still, I think
you must be hiding
somewhere in the deck.

In Collins' collection, Musical Tables, there are more than 100 poems. They are not in any of the short forms, such as haiku, tanka, or limerick. They are simply short. 

Reflections On An Amish Childhood

I was a little square
 in a round hat.

Collins points to other poets who go small, like William Carlos Williams, Richard Brautigan, W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, and Charles Simic.

Corridor

I've grown old.
Now my own name
rings a bell.

Listen to an interview with Collins about that collection and short poems.

Flaubert

As he looked for the right word,
several wrong words
appeared in his window.

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Valentines

Realizing that our February call for submissions is somewhat of an anti-Valentine's Day prompt, we remind you that we have done Valentines in the past. We offer you this video of Naomi reading a Valentine poem that we used and suggest that you look at our Valentines issue after you watch and listen to her poem. 

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Prompt: Breaking Up

The stores are full of red hearts for Valentine's Day. It is a day for love, romantic dinners, gifts, champagne, and engagements. It is also a day for some people to feel even lonelier. It's even a day for breakups.

Not to be totally unromantic but there are plenty of love poems already, and they're tough to write without sounding corny or like a young hormonal teen poet.

This February we are asking for poems about breakups, which is also a poetic tradition.

I was looking in a big anthology for other kinds of love poems. I found in the older poets John Clare’s "The Secret" where that love never even happens. That may be the worst kind of love poem but that's one way to avoid a breakup. "I loved thee, though I told thee not," says John. 

I found Edward Thomas' poem "Go Now" about a woman parting ways with the male speaker and the effect that her simply saying "Go now" had on him.

Like the touch of rain she was
On a man’s flesh and hair and eyes
When the joy of walking thus
Has taken him by surprise:

With the love of the storm he burns,
He sings, he laughs, well I know how,
But forgets when he returns
As I shall not forget her ‘Go now’.

Those two words shut a door
Between me and the blessed rain
That was never shut before
And will not open again.

I quite like this poem by Scottish poet Vicki Feaver titled "Coat" which uses that coat as the metaphor for the relationship. That's a nice mini-prompt. 

Coat   

Sometimes I have wanted
to throw you off
like a heavy coat.
Sometimes I have said
you would not let me
breathe or move.
But now that I am free
to choose light clothes
or none at all
I feel the cold
and all the time I think
how warm it used to be.

The poem I landed on for our model this month is by Stevie Smith. She was born Florence Margaret Smith in Hull, Yorkshire in 1902. She is somewhat deceptive in her sometimes nursery-rhyme-like cadences. (She also had whimsical drawings with which she illustrated poems.) But she is a sophisticated poet, whose poems often dealt with suffering and mortality. She also has a dark sense of humor. Her most famous poem is “Not Waving But Drowning.” Give it a read too.  

Our model poem is her "Pad Pad." Think of "pad" as walking with or as if with padded feet, like a cat or tiger. 

The short poem's opening stanza"

I always remember your beautiful flowers
And the beautiful kimono you wore
When you sat on the couch
With that tigerish crouch
And told me you loved me no more...

Of course, breakups are not relegated only to lovers. Families break up. Companies break up. The choice is yours.

One more caveat to your submission: Is it a coincidence that there are so many love sonnets of 14 lines and that Valentin's Day is on the 14th? I think it's synchronicity rather than coincidence. Your poem must be 14 lines whether a sonnet or not. 

We have been down that 14-step road before here, so if you want some sonnety ideas take a look at our bed sonnets, phone sonnets, sonnenizios inspired by Kim Addonizio and some more traditional sonnet forms.

The deadline for submissions is February 28, 2023.

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Charles Simic 1938-2023

Simic   GFDL 1.2, Link

Charles Simic, a former Poet Laureate, died this month from complications of dementia at the age of eighty-four. 

A winner of the Pulitzer Prize and countless other accolades, he was also a longtime teacher at the University of New Hampshire and co-poetry editor of the Paris Review.

Born in 1938, Simic was a prolific writer of both poetry and nonfiction. He wrote often about war-torn Belgrade, where his childhood was overshadowed by the Nazi invasion. He immigrated to the United States in 1954.

His work considered the mundane, the minuscule, and melancholy, but could also be funny. 

From his “Promises of Leniency and Forgiveness”:

    Incurable romantics marrying eternal grumblers.

    Life haunted by its more beautiful sister-life—

    Always, always … we had nothing

    But the way with words.

In his essay “Poetry and Experience,” Simic wrote "At least since [Ralph Waldo] Emerson and [Walt] Whitman, there’s a cult of experience in American poetry. Our poets, when one comes right down to it, are always saying: This is what happened to me. This is what I saw and felt. Truth, they never get tired of reiterating, is not something that already exists in the world, but something that needs to be rediscovered almost daily."

Read some poems by him at poets.org

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