Poetry, in truth, was not at all like how it had been presented to me throughout my early years of public education. I had been taught to read the lines and figure out what exactly it was supposed to mean, usually because there was a written response or a multiple-choice question involved. There were right and wrong answers to the symbolism, theme, and meter of poetry, just like there were right and wrong answers to the chemical formula for photosynthesis and subject/verb agreement for "she went to the store." It wasn't until I reached graduate school (yes, my sixth year of English studies) that I learned to appreciate poetry...through a class on how to teach poetry to students. The biggest thing I had to learn was that poetry is subjective by its very nature...and that's ok.
Once I let go of my right/wrong attitude and adopted the better founded/unsubstantiated stance, poetry became intriguing and almost addictive to me. While there were some meanings that wouldn't make sense simply because they couldn't be logically connected to the poem's imagery (and yes, imagery and sound are two of the most important parts of many poems...so much so that the words themselves can be meaningless--just their sounds matter), as long as you could find some sort of decent (hopefully strong) connection, it fit. After all, no one really knows what the author was thinking/feeling/meaning 100% of the time...sometimes not even the author him/herself.
Still...putting words on paper in poetic form was difficult. There were formulas for sonnets and haiku that helped, but to just let go of meaning and enjoy the nonsensical abstractness of words, images, and sounds (especially just disjointed ones) was extremely difficult. Enter a new muse: Mary Ruefle. I met the well-known poet in person once as part of a conference, and while I didn't connect with her personally, I adored a small book of hers. A Little White Shadow. It was the first I had ever seen of erasure-style poetry, a twist on found poetry but more raw and semi-artistic (The hard-to-find Humument by Tom Phillips is extremely artistic and more intense as it attempts to be its own story-within-a-story). The point of erasure poetry was to find prose, even really bad prose, and locate the gems of disjointed words that, when brought together through erasing all that was around them, created new thoughts and ideas. Sometimes erasures are completely silly images or statements. Sometimes they end up profound. The challenge of using only words already printed on the page, and then figuring out how to work with their existing order, was like the ultimate word-search puzzle with hidden prizes under the ink.
I was wanting to play around with this new composing form, so I picked up a 25-cent paperback copy of The Horse Without A Head from a sorority's booksale fundraiser on campus. It had some good words that popped out at me while I flipped through pages, the copyright had to be nearly up if I ever decided to publish my reworking of the text, and the original children's mystery was...horrible. Even the worst erasure of the text would be an improvement. For the next few days, I carried the conveniently-sized book in my purse, along with a purple pen, and began outlining the text I would keep. Over the next few months, I experimented with different types of white-out, acrylic paint, and correction fluids to banish the unworthy words from the page. I rather liked the non-uniformity of the erasing, with some pages glossy with white and others hosting cracked strips of eggshell tape. It was a wonderfully freeing exercise...and the creativity born in erasure poetry not only spurned wonderful poetic images that I wove into my prose, but eventually led to a few freeverse poems that I'm actually rather proud of.
My retitled collection of erasure poems, He With A Head, includes nearly two hundred pages of good, great, and uh-oh bad erasures. Most are to be taken individually, a single moment to be considered, perhaps savored, and then either stored away for future musings or tossed aside like an amusing but meaningless status update on Facebook. Not being able to draw a straight line meant some words were accidentally erased too much...and it was more of a playbook than a truly careful endeavor, so I wasn't super-obsessive about neatness. It's a little messy...kind of like me. Erasure lets me do that.
So to look at the title poem for my rediscovered text..."He with a head should pay dearly for it." What does it mean? Maybe it means that those who have the awareness of decision also have the awareness of consequences. Maybe it means that men who think logically will suffer for it (especially when they're around PMSing women). Maybe it means that being able to think is such a precious thing, a costly thing, something that should be valued much more than it is (the intellect versus, say, braun). Maybe it means that this guy is about to have one huge headache and needs to take an Excedrin. It could mean any of these. It could mean none of them. Ultimately, erasure is about taking away...in order to give. What meaning will you give this piece?
Or this one?
No comments:
Post a Comment