NaPoWriMo Day 27: Erasures and Discoveries

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Table of Contents

• Before We Begin…

• Poem: “The Author Writes a First Draft of His Wedd …

• Divinations

• Prompt

Before We Begin…

Normally, I have you do a freewrite at the start of this newsletter. Today we’ll do something different.

Collect some texts that are meaningful, interesting, or even provocative for you. These can be texts you love and hate. Poems, articles, essays, stories, emails, magazines, love letters, hate mail, government documents, etc.

Find texts that compel you to choose them, even though you don’t know what you’re doing with them yet. They can be physical or digital.

Poem: “The Author Writes a First Draft of His Wedding Vows” by Hanif Abdurraqib

(An erasure of Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter to her husband, Leonard.)

Dearest,

I feel certain I am going mad again.

we will go through             terrible times. And            recover. I
begin to hear your voice, and can’t             concentrate. So I am
doing what seems

will give me the greatest possible happiness.

I don’t think two people could           have been happier      with
this disease. I know
that without                    you       I    can’t properly feel.

What I want to say is You             have

saved me.

Everything has gone from me

but the certainly of your goodness.

Divinations

This is an erasure poem, or a poem created by taking a text and erasing words until a new text is formed. It’s a fun exercise in language and creativity, as it can result in some startling accidents of language. It’s also an exercise in intertextuality, in that the erasure is formed by and, thus, commenting on the original text somehow.

Each word of the above erasure poem is carefully selected, and each word holds a stunning amount of grief, irony, love, and madness. The poem incorporates erasures and absences in the text, creating an internal tension in the sentences, as though a sentence could be internally enjambed. And what does it mean that a suicide letter has become a wedding vow? Abdurraqib has preserved the most emotional parts of Woolf’s letter while also assembling those parts into something new: a poem that is saved by the madness of love.

There are different ways of thinking about erasure. Abdurraqib erased words to create a new poem; however, there’s also a cousin form, the “blackout poem”, in which words are not erased but simply blacked out. The process is the same, but the effect is different: instead of words disappearing, they simply hide beneath black rectangles.

For example, an anonymous poet once blacked out a New York Times front page article announcing the 1929 stock market crash. The words not blacked out read: “Because I could not stop for debt, he kindly stopped for me.”

There’s also a way of engaging with fragments of text called a cento. The cento is a poem composed of lines from other poems. No line from the poem is written by the poet, but the arrangement of the borrowed lines reveals something new about the lines themselves and puts different poets in conversation with one another.

Lastly, there’s even a way to think about fragmenting texts by collaging them. This is called a “found poem,” or a poem discovered through other texts. Kenji C. Liu also invented the frankenpo form, a type of found poem that borrows language from different texts and constructs new poems about them. The texts he borrows from often have some relationship to questions of masculinity, but he challenges both the source texts and the meanings of those texts by juxtaposing them in unexpected ways.

Prompt

Write a poem that borrows language from other texts, such as an erasure, blackout, or found poem. If none of those forms speak to you, perhaps you can even invent a new form of found poetry.