This year I plan to add to my November exercises some excursions into poetic forms like erasure, cento, n+7, homophony (if that’s a good word for what Toby Fitch does), and others as I think of them. My idea is to make something from the day’s newspaper as source text.
I’m kicking off today with an erasure poem. Here’s one description of erasure poetry, from the poets.org website.
Erasure poetry, also known as blackout poetry, is a form of found poetry wherein a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or otherwise obscures a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new work from what remains.
You can read more about it, with links to ‘seminal’ works, here. Andy Jackson”s ‘borne away by distance’ is a fine example I have encountered recently (online here).
Here’s my offering, from page 1, column 5 of today’s Sydney Morning Herald.
Or, to type it out and give it a title:
Virtue ________++++++_________Glad ____________________secret ______++_________grace ___________duties, ________+++++__honest ________+++++__dog. The _dependent ____mission gains ________++++++____trust or courage ________+__Wag Wag .
Make of it what you will. I love it.
Me fail? I fly! 