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.  ヅ

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