Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Day 21 ... NaPoWriMo / Poem-a-Day 2015


Day Twenty-One. The final day of National Poetry Month's third week. Counting today, 10 poems to go. And 20 poems done so far. I think I've done 22, though, because on a couple of occasions, I did more than one poem. But who's counting? Let's poem, friends!

Robert Lee Brewer's PAD suggestion today is his usual "Two for Tuesday": "Write a 'what you are' poem" and/or "Write a 'what you are not' poem."

Maureen Thorson's NaPoWriMo challenge today "is 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."

Let's begin today with Alan. "I am attempting to satisfy both prompts today, with a 'something is something' erasure," Alan writes. "The original source comes from Flannery O'Connor's essay collection, Mystery and Manners."

The transcription of the erasure would read as follows:

[T]he whole personality is a symbol
or whatever makes no difference.
Pain is joy, is love, and what they are
is all well and good,
but the whole range of human feeling
finds lodging it tells the world
makes a great difference bound
like God in a double way:
the artist's surest instinct
when the natural world is seen
and a world which reaches divine things.

—Draft by Thomas Alan Holmes    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]

Excellent erasure, Alan. You make it look so easy! I like how you found an apostrophe s at one point when you needed a possessive! Congratulations.

Today, I didn't combine the prompts. First, I worked with the NaPoWriMo suggestion. I used Wave Books's nifty erasure-poetry generator at erasures.wavepoetry.com: you can choose a source text there and select words to erase or un-erase to create your poem. A little tip: erase the whole text first (you can still see it as light gray) and then click words to bring them back . . . a much more natural-feeling "writing" process.

The source text I chose was an excerpt from "Out of the Fog" by C. K. Ober. Here's how that text looked beforehand.
And here's the erasure poem I created from it. Inspiration came from my childhood in San Francisco, where nights were often punctuated by the lonesome sound of fog horns out by the Bay.
Here's that erasure poem transcribed and relineated.

The fog horn blowing hard
and so near seemed almost
the call of bitter disappointment
perishing in the street
a great cry out of the deep

—Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]

Second, I worked on a PAD "what you are"/"what you are not" poem based on the emotions and particulars of this erasure poem.

True Story

You are the fog horn booming
out of deep sleep like a black whale.

You are not the gay Filipino man
lying on the sidewalk the next street over,
blood leaking from his chest, where
the hilt of a knife sticks out.

You are not his last breath,
the shudder of his death rattle
leaking out into thick San Francisco air.

You are his brother.

—Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.]

Well, there you go. Worked with the one Thorson prompt and both Brewer prompts. Not all in the same text, but the two poems interlace with one another.

The best erasure poet in the US, as far as I'm concerned, is Carriezona, whose work can be seen at DeviantArt.com. Here's her poem "The Children" . . . note how she creates an esthetically pleasing visual shape around the un-erased words. Just brilliant. (Click on the image to see the original at DeviantArt.com.)
I was honored to feature Carriezona in the blog in 2011 and 2012, when she was using the pseudonym Carrieola. I only hope one day to be able to do erasures as well as she does, both artistically and textually.

Friends, won't you comment, please? Love to know what you're thinking. To comment, look for a red line below that starts Posted by, then click once on the word comments in that line. If you don't find the word "comments" in that line, then look for a blue link below that says Post a comment and click it once. Thanks!

Ingat, everyone.   


NAPOWRIMO / PAD 2015 • Pick a day in April: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30


3 comments:

Mrs. Burgess said...

Vince, I admire your post today, for combining the prompts, in two parts, and for making an emotionally resonant poem.

Here's a different take on erasure: For this coming Sunday's celebration of Jennifer Bosveld--her artistry as a poet, her business that published and kept over 2000 titles in print while she was alive and healthy, for creating the term "applied poetry" and "virtual journalism poetry," for starting and furthering many American poets' careers, and for the good she did raising $100,000,000 for community service non-profits, and saving the life of a mentally retarded man who'd been charged with murder--for this celebration I created a poem made from lines of her poems, one line each from each of her books, anthologies, chapbooks I owned, in a highlighting, rather than an erasure.

Why does my name show up as Mrs. Burgess?!

vstefani said...

All the poems in this post are terrific. Vince, "True Story" just knocks me out and blows me away, even before that gut-wrenching, heart-breaking last line.

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