I've been spending a lot of time (one might argue too much) at the homestead, scanning endless pages of internet about poetry and things related to poetry. Like watching out the window onto a busy street, one tends to find the same subjects passing by intermittently. I've lately been finding The ms of my kin by Janet Holmes passing my "window." I have not yet read this book, and i stress yet, but its presence has opened me up to the wonderful complexities of erasure poetry, to which I'm thankful.
Erasure poetry had escaped my notice: I have always been mired by inattentiveness. The idea of creating new context for previous was at first repulsive to me. What was so different between erasure and say, graffiti? (It's an analogy that's got some holes: graffiti usually a medium on top of a different medium - paint and/or poster on architecture; erasure strictly of the same medium - literature on literature) Not to get off on too much of a tangent, but let's just say I wasn't too keen originally with the concept of erasure poetry.
I am not alone. Silliman, in his blog, questioned his favorable first impression of Homes' book, saying he was "ill-at-ease" with a book that was, in his eyes, well-executed and somewhat of a "delight to hold." What made him hesitant is the question of spirit of innovation and poetic expansion. The entry is a good read and thought provoking. What I think is interesting is Silliman's last assertion that if previous erasure projects, such as Ronald Johnson's Radi os, are literary pioneers, Holmes is more of a settler in the "town & farms" sense. This analogy is fitting. What is the frontier without the contrast of towns and farms?
Chewing on Silliman's post for a bit, finding mentions of ...kin, made me wonder of what use is erasure? And do I really want to start blacking out lines of old Goodwill .95$ treasures to find out? Luckily for me, I didn't have to destroy an actual book to experiment in erasure. I only had to click on over to Wave Books, who have a section on their site that allows one to create (and re-create) erasures with all the joy and none of the contact high.
With a veritable wall of text confronting me, I quickly realized that the creation of an erasure poem from prose is deceptive. I quickly accumulated a series of creations that were merely masquerading as poetry. I believed the presence of a narrative would make things easy, that I could quickly pick apart the text and discover its secrets. This was not the case. Any series of words that jumped off the screen at me were too easy: were hollow. I'll spare you the torture of reading any of these "poems." I'll just say I found myself with the same feeling that I have when I'm confronting writer's block, only worse: now I had someone else talking in my ear while I tried to write.
Again I was brought back to the work Holmes did, and came across an interview by Rauan Klassnik. He asked a couple of questions about the craft of erasure poetry; about the rules, tricks and so forth. A quote that stood out for me, was
... it felt [at times] like collaborating with Dickinson: the words were telling a narrative so like the atrocity we had lived through, and they were already there to be unearthed.
This sparked something I was listening to this week (the auditory necessity of poetry should be a post for another day). Steve Scher talked with W.S. Merwin for a bit, touched on the usual talking points about craft and reading, but something Merwin said both intrigued and dismayed me:
[Writing poetry] means learning language, your language. The way to learn your language is to translate. You translate from other languages. It will teach you your own language ... That by the time your finished you've found 20 different ways of saying [a phrase] that you would have never found any other way.
This is first depressing because, while peers have learned Spanish, French, German, I took Latin from 8th grade through my freshman year of undergrad. Took it and then forgot it all. In this way, until I start to learn another language, the importance of translation might be lost on me. However, what's really intriguing (and you can see where I'm going) is how this thought on translation interacts with the earlier quotation from Holmes.
Given Holmes' assertion that at times she felt like she was working alongside Dickinson, as if she was unearthing a meaning hidden within the text, doesn't erasure in some way act like translation? Both require an attentiveness to what is already there, to the intent of an author, a channeling of language, a re-imagining of image that often has no translation. Although I have only dabbled in half of this equation, it is exciting for me to think of erasure as English to English translation. An exercise to create meaning within seemingly narrow confines, teasing as many meanings as possible from a poem seems to perform the function that Merwin proposes.
This leads to many questions, both interior and for the greater "community" What do you think? how similar is the process of erasure to translation? What are the differences (an obvious one is recreation vs. separation)? What, if any, worth is there in having lots of poets practicing erasure? Isn't it good to have "town & farms" in poetry? Should it be practiced in schools?
I know I will be exploring this practice (and picking up Janet's book, i swear) in the future, if only to learn more of my own (personal) language from the language of another.