Tuesday 21 April 2015

On The Mat



Today's NaPoWriMo prompt: an old favorite – the erasure! This involves taking a pre-existing text and blacking out or erasing words, while leaving the placement of the remaining words intact … One easy way to get started is just to photocopy a page from a book or magazine, and black out words. Or you can copy a text into Microsoft Word, and turn the words you don’t want white. Erasures can feel almost like a game – carving new poems out of old texts like carving statues from blocks of marble — and so they take some of the anxiety out of writing. They can also lead to surprising new ideas, as the words of the original text are given new contexts.

If I had to take one type of poem away with me to a desert island it would be the blackout/erasure poem. (Although I wouldn't be travelling light. I'd also have to pack a stack of newspapers, magazines and books to use as my source material!) I have "written" several erasure poems already this month, including yesterday's poem. Thinking this was a bit naughty, I resolved that today's poem would not be an erasure poem. So, I had to laugh when I saw the NaPoWriMo prompt! Today's poem is meant to be an erasure poem. Hurrah!

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