Hello, all. Today marks the end of the third week of NaPoWriMo. We’re getting near the finish line now!
Today’s featured participant is Whimsygizmo, where the “I know” poem has a restless sort of melancholy, the sense of taking stock and summing up before continuing on.
And our poetry resource for the day is Leslie D.’s NaPoWriMo poet interviews. Blogger Leslie D. is not just writing poems each day for NaPoWrimo; she’s interviewing a poet every day!
Our prompt for today (optional, as always) 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. I’ve been working on an erasure project that involves an old guide to rose-growing. Here’s an example of an original page, side-by-side with my “erased” page:
One easy way to get started is just to photocopy a page from a book or magazine, and black out words. Or you can copy a text into Microsoft Word, and turn the words you don’t want white. Erasures can feel almost like a game – carving new poems out of old texts like carving statues from blocks of marble — and so they take some of the anxiety out of writing. They can also lead to surprising new ideas, as the words of the original text are given new contexts.
Happy writing!
