Hi, happy New Year, and thanks for reading! Today is Monday, so we’re going to talk about poetry.
I’m still working on setting up the New and Improved Paid Tier of this newsletter, so today’s poetry post is quick. I have an editorial calendar underway, and right now, it has a whole list of essays that paid subscribers will be receiving on Thursdays. But I’m still tweaking the additional poetry posts, which will come to you on Tuesdays. Right now, my plan is to launch that paid content come January 16 – so be on the lookout.
Today we’re going to be doing an erasure poem, or a blackout poem, rather. Because even though I did not black out on New Year’s Eve, I’ll take any shoehornable theme.
Exercise: Blank Space, Baby
I’ve arranged this exercise to be cathartic and maybe a little cheesy, but you don’t necessarily have to approach it that way. There’s a pre-practice step you’ll need to do – take note.
Before we get started, I need you to find a large-ish piece of text. It can be your own writing or someone else’s. For this particular prompt, I’d loooooove if you chose a piece of text that represents something you want to leave behind in 2022. Maybe it’s the pithy text you sent/received in the middle of an argument, a series of rejection emails, the wedding writeup about your grade school nemesis that your hometown paper ran, or a bad review of the blockbuster failure only you enjoyed. Between 400 and 1,000 words is ideal. For my example, I chose a 600-word section of a medical journal article.
Now that you’ve selected your text, you can choose your approach. You’ll need one of these configurations of items: a printer/highlighters/a pencil/a felt-tip marker; or your favorite word processor.
Set your timer for two minutes.
Go through your big block of text and highlight the phrases you like. When I do this digitally, I use the “highlight” feature in Google Docs, but I also like using an actual highlighter when I do it analog-style. Often, I end up going back and striking out some of the initial words or phrases I planned to use, and this creates interesting visual layers.Set your timer for two minutes.
Now that you’ve selected some words you probably do want to use, grab a dark felt-tip pen or set your “highlight” color to black or dark grey. We’re going to choose words you definitely don’t want to use. Go ahead and erase any of the phrases you know you won’t want to include in a poem – stuff like “myocardial ischaemia” or specific names/places/jargon that won’t hold a lot of meaning.Set your timer for one minute.
Before I really go to town with a blackout poem, I like to use a different piece of paper or a different section of my document to explore potential combinations of phrases. Go through your remaining text and try this yourself. You can mix and match the “connective tissue” of conjunctions, prepositions and verb phrases. Remember that you can leave biiiiiiiiiig gaps between your selected words – and sometimes a big section of blacked-out text says more than “filler” words could. Get experimental and don’t worry too much about grammar or punctuation.Set your timer for five minutes (warning: if you’re using a skinny .38 Muji ballpoint pen, this will end up taking way longer)
It’s now or never! Get in there and start blacking out your text with gusto. Remember, it’s just a poem. If you want to go back and change things later, you can reprint or re-edit this document. Remember too that this can be very cathartic, taking a piece of text and changing the meaning by wallpapering over anything you no longer need or want.
Here’s the erasure poem I’m using as an example, which I actually composed earlier this year. I hope it serves you well as an example – and for readability, I put the text below the image.
I did that thing where I searched for an answer
According to millions of people
those who suffer
should be working
to form scar tissue
Your heart is nature's damage. It is a bad thing, this
mechanical action, blood cells
The heart has lead to
'the problem'
Making better scars may be easier than
fighting.
Are our bodies responsible for this job in our hearts, to
know
the crucial trauma?
We can work to exist at least partially.
In ten years' time
bodies could
be
tissue muscle scars
electrical invisible
new animal hopeful
That’s that! I’ll see you on Friday with a new dispatch. Happy writing until then!