Erasure

Bringing new ideas to a surface

My poetry teacher Gail Wronsky has been creating these fun erasures over on her Instagram account.

we lose everything / even the floors we walk on and / beneath them / our wounds

AND I HAVE WANTED TO DO ONE FOR AWHILE!!!

First, what is erasure?

🤖 ChatGPT says:

Erasure is a literary form in which a writer creates a new text by selectively removing, blacking out, or obscuring words from an existing work. What remains becomes a poem or piece of writing that both engages with and transforms the source material, revealing unexpected meanings through absence and silence as much as through the visible words.

Erasure can happen in all kinds of ways. But Gail’s poems exhibit her particular affinity for imagery and language.

There’s so much to do / release feathered / lyre birds / unclothe / fearless / hours

Finally, in possession of printed papers…

…with words on them that I was willing to scribble over, I did it.

What do you think?

To use a flamethrower

Images from that experience stuck in his head and started to dream up lots and lots of fire.

his fire dreams would be a showstopper. It wasn’t about fighting more guys, he said. It really shows a skill set.

No one just picks up a human on fire. So the first time it shocked her. Eventually she got the hang of it.

🤔

Thoughts?