Prompt: Erasures

Blackout poem by Chris Lott using a page from
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

Erasure poetry, sometimes known as blackout poetry, is a form of found poetry wherein a poet takes an existing text and erases, blacks out, or whites out a large portion of the text, creating a wholly new work from what remains. The new poem probably does not carry the same meaning as the original text. Oftentimes, it conveys quite an opposite meaning.

Erasure poetry is simple. Pick a text to erase, such as a magazine or newspaper story, famous poems, a passage from a novel, or maybe from a text ad. For our call this month, I recommend using no more than a page, and perhaps just a paragraph or two.

I have done blackout poetry by literally taking a black marker to the original. The resulting text looks like those redacted classified documents we sometimes see from the coverage of government proceedings. 

Besides creating new meaning in the remaining text, the page can also have a visual look with the gaps. That is not a requirement and at times I think it looks like the poem has holes, so simply making line or stanza breaks for the erased text will suffice. 

Doris Cross is thought to be one of the first to employ the erasure technique in poetry with her 1965 “Dictionary Columns.”  

There are examples of far more ambitious erase poetry. Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os is a revision of the first four books of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. I picked up a library copy of Jen Bervin’s Nets which uses Shakespeare's sonnets as primary source texts. The ms of my kin by Janet Holmes uses the poems of Emily Dickinson as a source. M. NourbeSe Philip created the political Zong! using as its source the legal text from a case against Gregson, a company that owned the ship Zong on which 150 Africans were massacred.

Tracy K. Smith has written several erasure poems, including "Declaration" which is drawn from the Declaration of Independence) in which she shows the places where erasures have occurred with blank spaces. Listen to the poet read her erasure poem and without the page before you with its white space, it sounds like an original work. And in fact, it is. Then read the poem.

I am also including two short poems of my own as examples of erasure without the blackouts or white spaces using only breaks to indicate the gaps. 

NOTE that for your submission, you must include a note below your title indicating the original text used.

THE REASON
(from Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason)

To the happiness of man:
infidelity 

not believing,
or disbelieving

professing to believe
what one does not believe

priests and conjurors
are of the same trade

UNIVERSITY OF OZ
(from an advertisement for an online diploma mill)

Obtain a prosperous future,
money earning power,
and the admiration of all.

Diplomas from prestigious
non-accredited universities
based on your present knowledge

No required tests,
classes, books, or interviews.
Life experience

Bachelors, Masters, MBAs,
and Doctorates
available in the field of your choice.

No one is turned down.
Confidentiality assured.
CALL NOW

receive your diploma
it pays
within days

       by Kenneth Ronkowitz

Submission Deadline: March 31, 2023

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For all of our past prompts and more than 300 issues, visit our website at poetsonline.org

Prompt: Menu Poems

Photo by Julien Sister on StockSnap

When you hear the word "menu," your first thought is probably about a restaurant's list of the dishes available. "Menu" does have other usages including almost any list or set of items, activities, etc., from which to choose. A friend might ask, "What's on the menu for the weekend?" Websites almost always have a menu of options available to a user. Screens of all sizes have menu options, such as those for Netflix and streaming services. 

The word "menu" is mid-19th-century French, and it meant any small, detailed list. It came from Latin minutus, meaning "very small." Lists of prepared foods for customers go back much further to the Song dynasty in China. 

The original French menus were presented on a small chalkboard. In French, that chalkboard was "a carte" so foods chosen from that bill of fare are described as "à la carte" or literally, "according to the board." Today, à la carte items are generally specials that are not on the main menu.

I tried to find a menu poem to use here as a model without success. That surprises me since menu language is filled with hyphens, quotation marks, puffery, and foreign words that might appeal to poets. The majority of foreign words are French, and so we have menu items such as "spring mushroom civet," "pain of rabbit," and "orange-jaggery gastrique."

Maybe we have invented a new poetry form!

The closest I found to menu poems are list poems (sometimes called catalog poems). A list poem can be a list of single words, or it could be a list of similar sentences. But a list poem should not be just a list. The best of them use items that have a relation to each other, tell a story, or perhaps offer commentary on a subject.

Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" and Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" are list poems. I found Anne Porter's "List of Praises" and James Tate's "The List of Famous Hats" but they aren't what I imagine a menu poem to be. I found "A Little Menu" by Don Mee Choi, but it is still basically a list poem.

A list poem is a good form for young and new poets since it is an easier form to follow. I found a collection for young readers, Falling Down the Page: A Book of List Poems by Georgia Heard. I like the poem by the editor that uses a recipe for its list.

"Recipe for Writing An Autumn Poem" by Georgia Heard

One teaspoon wild geese.
One tablespoon red kite.
One cup wind song.
One pint trembling leaves.
One quart darkening sky.
One gallon north wind. 

Another poem that takes the list form a bit further is "My Love Sent Me a List" by Olena Kalytiak Davis. It is also a "found" poem as it uses lines from Shakespeare's sonnets. It begins:

O my Love sent me a lusty list,
Did not compare me to a summer's day
Wrote not the beauty of mine eyes
But catalogued in a pretty detailed
And comprehensive way the way(s)
In which he was better than me...

Since menus usually have some explanation of each item, I thought that "Objects Used to Prop Open a Window" by Michelle Menting comes closer to the menu form I imagined. 

The poem moves from object that could literally keep a window open - 

Dog bone, stapler,

cribbage board, garlic press

     because this window is loose—lacks

suction, lacks grip.

to objects that can't literally prop open a window.

Velvet moss, sagebrush,

willow branch, robin's wing

     because this window, it's pane-less. It's only

a frame of air.

So what kind of menu poem are we looking for this month? You can start with a list of some kind, be it names, places, actions, thoughts, or images. Since a menu is about options, that should be a consideration. The grand language of the restaurant menu can be employed. The branching sub-menus we find online are also a possible structure. Most list poems don't rhyme, but that might be something to consider. You might also use an additional form, such as it being a sonnet, found poem, etc. Again, what makes a list or menu poem more than just a list is what the poet does with the items beyond mere listing.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: October 31, 2021

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Visit our website at poetsonline.org

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Prompt: Lost (and Perhaps Found)

Jane Hirshfield has a new book of poems out this month titled Ledger (from Alfred A. Knopf). I saw one of the poems on The Writer's Almanac - "Advice to Myself" - and I immediately identified the idea of a computer file that comes up blank.

Her poem begins:

The computer file
of which
I have no recollection
is labeled “advice to myself”

I click it open
look
scroll further down

the screen
stays backlit and empty

thus I meet myself again
hopeful and useless...

Not only have I come across computer files that are empty or just don't make any sense to me currently, but I also have more than a few "poems" that I started in a document and when I looked back at them weeks or months later my reaction is "Where was I going with this?"

Perhaps this is just a sign of aging, along with the other lost things unpoetic - phone numbers, people's names, books read and movies seen and lots of events.

All of those seem trivial compared with the things we lose and don't find.

Carl Sandburg was "Lost" quite literally "Desolate and lone / All night long on the lake."

When Stephen Dobyns was "Lost," he asked, "Where had wrong turns been made?"

For Ellen Bass, it's a "Lost Dog." 

But for Lucille Clifton, it is a very serious "the lost baby poem."

Lucyna Prostko claims that "Nothing Is Lost."

I believe that most of us hope that when something is lost, it will eventually be found. Ron Padgett wrote a poem that said that "Man has lost his gods" but later wrote in "Lost and Found" and wondered "What did I mean?"

John Milton thought that it was paradise that was lost, but then he wrote Paradise Regained.

But back to Jane's poem that started this prompt. What appealed to me in that short poem was the idea that things lost are often not found.

For your writing this month, we are looking for poems about things lost - and are perhaps found or perhaps not.

Submission Deadline: March 31, 2020

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Visit our website at poetsonline.org

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Prompt: Get the News from Poems

Late in his career, William Carlos Williams wrote a long poem titled “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.” Toward the end of the poem, he wrote: "It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there."

Is news what is found in poems? Or is what we get from poems not news but what we need to live?

In B.J. Ward's poem, a man decides to get his news not from the newspaper but from Shakespeare's Othello.

Daily Grind
by BJ Ward

A man awakes every morning
and instead of reading the newspaper
reads Act V of Othello.
He sips his coffee and is content
that this is the news he needs
as his wife looks on helplessly.
The first week she thought it a phase,
his reading this and glaring at her throughout,
the first month an obsession,
the first year a quirkiness in his character,
and now it’s just normal behavior,
this mood setting in over the sliced bananas,
so she tries to make herself beautiful
to appease his drastic taste.
And every morning, as he shaves
the stubble from his face, he questions everything—
his employees, his best friend’s loyalty,
the women in his wife’s canasta club,
and most especially the wife herself
as she puts on lipstick in the mirror next to him
just before he leaves. This is how he begins
each day of his life—as he tightens the tie
around his neck, he remembers the ending,
goes over it word by word in his head,
the complex drama of his every morning
always unfolded on the kitchen table,
a secret Iago come to light with every sunrise
breaking through his window, the syllables
of betrayal and suicide always echoing
as he waits for his car pool, just under his lips
even as he pecks his wife goodbye.

from Jackleg Opera: Collected Poems, 1990 to 2013 (North Atlantic Books)

In the play, Othello confronts Desdemona about committing adultery and then strangles her in their bed. But Emilia realizes what her husband Iago has done and she exposes him. He kills her. Othello now realizes, too late, that Desdemona is innocent. He stabs Iago but doesn't kill him, saying he would rather have Iago live the rest of his life in pain. Then Iago and Othello are arrested for the murders of Roderigo, Emilia, and Desdemona. Othello commits suicide.

Othello is not a comedy.

If the "daily grind" is the difficult, routine and monotonous tasks of daily work - the newspaper, coffee, breakfast, shaving, the tie - then reading Othello breaks that routine. But "the complex drama of his every morning" was always there, "always unfolded on the kitchen table." And now, "a secret Iago come to light with every sunrise."

What news did the husband find in this play-in-verse?  Is it the syllables of "betrayal and suicide always echoing" and he waits for his ride to work? Is that what is "just under his lips / even as he pecks his wife goodbye?"

This is not a comedy either.

But returning to that poem by William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower," here the poet finds the news in the form of a love poem written to his wife. But this long love poem also has its dark moments.

My heart rouses
                        thinking to bring you news
                                                of something
that concerns you
                        and concerns many men.  Look at
                                                what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
                        despised poems.
                                                It is difficult
to get the news from poems
                        yet men die miserably every day
                                                for lack
of what is found there.
                        Hear me out
                                                for I too am concerned
and every man
                        who wants to die at peace in his bed
                                                besides.


Allen Ginsberg, a great admirer of William Carlos Williams, titled one of his books Planet News. That book contains a poem about getting the news of Williams' death. The poem is called “Death News” and it is about his first reactions upon hearing of the death of his elder.

Ezra Pound said, “Poetry is news that stays news.”

So much news by poets.

This month we are writing poems about the news. It is a deceptively challenging prompt. It might mean writing about the news as it is found in poetry, or the poetry found in the news.  As Williams might have said, this is the information that doesn’t become dated or irrelevant with the passage of time.

Submission deadline: November 30, 2019

             

Prompt: Finders, Keepers

WordPress offers an Intro to Poetry 101 freebie online “course” to inspire you to write 10 poems in 10 days. Really, it is just a very brief one-word prompt and some poetry form and language suggestions. I don’t normally need much prompting to write, but it is good to get poked into writing once and awhile.  

On my Writing the Day website, I devote myself to the ronka form, but I took up this October challenge and let some other forms slip onto the site. Poems for this little side project are tagged #poetry101 there, and you can see poems by others as part of this project at wordpress.com/tag/poetry101.

One of their prompts was the "found poem" which is a form we used on Poets Online back in 2010. I decided to use it again because it is such a deceptively easy form. Easy in that someone else has done the writing for you, but a good and more difficult exercise in what makes a poem a poem. And what better prompt could I use for a found poem than a prompt that I found.

Here is what Wordpress gave us to use:

A found poem is composed of words and letters you’ve collected — randomly or not — from other sources, whether printed, handwritten, or digital, and then (re)arranged into something meaningful. Since a found poem is made up of words and letters others have created, it’s up to you, the poet, to find them (hence the name), extract them, and rejig them into something else: your poem.

The classic way of going about the creation of a found poem is scissors and newspaper in hand: you cut out words and phrases and arrange them into your poem. You can then either snap a photo and upload it to your blog, or simply transcribe the resulting text into a new post.

That said, you can control the degree of randomness you impose on your available stock of words, as well as on the procedure you follow to create the poem. You can photocopy a page from a book (even a book of poetry!) and select every fifth word on the first ten pages. Repurpose one of your unpublished drafts into something new. You can even use your books to create some book spine poetry, or recycle your tweets (one online tool will actually do it for you) and other social media messages and turn them into a poetic meditation on… anything, really. Another popular option is erasure or blackout poetry, where you cross out words from an existing printed page until the remaining ones produce a new meaning.

As with our earlier attempts at found poetry, there are some rules for submissions:

1. Use only the words found in the source - no changing verb forms, making plurals etc. 
2. but the title can be original (and often makes a difference in the way the poem will be read.
3. You can add or subtract capitalization and punctuation. 
4. Your tools are careful selection, ordering, line breaks and stanzas. 
5. You must identify the original source either in the title or a note at the beginning or end of the poem. (If the source is online, you could give a link for the reader to follow.)

Deadline for submissions is November 5, 2017

Tweeting Iambic Pentameter

Another piece of technology is mixing with poetry.

That hesitation right before a kiss
I don't remember ever learning this
I've never had a valentine before
I'm not a little baby anymore

If that is poetry, it's technological "found poetry."  Those rhyming couplets written in iambic pentameter come from Twitter and were found by an algorithm. Yes, those ten-syllable lines of alternating emphasis that we learned about in school when we studied Shakespeare, sonnets and blank verse have been pulled from tweets by a program called Pentametron.

Pentametron (@pentametron on twitter, which you can follow without joining twitter itself)  is set up to monitor public tweets, pull out those in iambic pentameter, look for pairs that rhyme, and then retweet them as a couplet.

The site's motto is:
"With algorithms subtle and discrete
I seek iambic writings to retweet."

Is it poetry? That's your call. But it is interesting that these random couplings sometimes produce logical groupings.

I haven't got the mindset anymore
the tiny inner voice becomes a Roar!
Another boy without a sharper knife.
Closed eye and hoping for a better life

This isn't the first poetry via Twitter site that I have written about. Earlier there was the "Longest Poem in the World" which is still running.

In an NPR interview, the creator of Pentamentron, Ranjit Bhatnagar, said that he had been "... inspired by the exquisite corpse games of the surrealists" and realized that Twitter could supply "an endless waterfall of tweets."

Some make sense -

I wanna be a news reporter, yo
I never listen to the radio

I pay attention to details okay.
Its gonna be a busy day today :(


and others are... well, not so clearly connected

She's like a rainbow, painted black and white.
Not going to the ball tomorrow night.

Of course, a lot of people who don't regularly read poetry might say that "real" poems often don't make sense to them, so...

Pentrametron generates 15 to 20 couplets of 140-characters or less on an average day.

Found Poetry: Status Updates

One complaint you might hear from poets who dislike "found poetry" is that it's not poetry. (There's another group with the same argument for prose poems.)

Because this month's writing prompt is found poems, I have been more in tune with "finding" poems. When I saw that Facebook allowed me to grab some of the "status updates" I have posted there during 2009, I tried it.

Now, "status" (as defined in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary) is a noun coming from Latin (see state) into English circa 1630 and meaning
1. position or rank in relation to others
2. state or condition with respect to circumstances

Then what was my state or condition in 2009 according to my Facebook life?







Is there a poem in there? Maybe. I came up with this at first look.

cardinals picking dried berries.
days don't seem any longer
on this rainy day
April is not the cruelest month


It's just interesting to think about something like your online life as being recorded and then looking at it in the context of a poem. Just throwing out ideas...

Prompt: Lost and Found

All poetry is found somewhere or in something. That's what inspiration is all about. The writing of "Found Poetry" formalizes that mostly accidental practice.

For this month, Poets Online is asking for found poems as submissions.

Not only can this technique serve as an antidote to writer's block, but it can also offer you fresh topics, language, images, and observations.

You can use newspaper articles, headlines, advertisements, junk mail, letters from others and a thousand other starting points.

In the samples I have put on the prompt on our main site (two of them are my own), the sources were a newspaper article in the cooking section and an email.

Here's a found poem that came from a magazine ad.

CHANCES ARE

Depression isolates you
all alone in the world.
Suddenly,
for no apparent reason -
trouble sleeping,
irritable,
trouble feeling pleasure,
lose your appetite.
Symptoms.
Too much to handle.
Everyday life
may drop.

That can happen.

And someone you love
is blossoming again.

(found in a magazine ad for the drug Prozac)

Here is another found poem. Reading it without knowing the source might make it work better.

TO THE HAPPINESS OF MAN

Infidelity does not consist in believing,
or in disbelieving.

It consists in professing to believe
what one does not believe.

Priests and conjurors
are of the same trade,

and the most formidable weapon
against errors of every kind

is reason.

I have used that poem with students and teachers as a way to open a discussion that might deal with happiness, belief or reason. I reveal that it is a found poems and that all the words come from a piece they are going to read by Thomas Paine. It makes the point that some of his lines, especially when read in isolation and with the focus we give a line of poetry, are profound. Later, I will have them do the same kind of thing with another reading - simply pulling out selected lines and phrases that are striking (whether or not we ever create poetry from them).

The rules for this month's writing prompt?

In its purest form, a found poem uses only the words found in the source - no changing verb forms, making plurals etc. You can add or subtract capitalization and punctuation. And your most powerful tools, next to your careful selection and ordering, are line breaks and stanzas. I would also allow that adding an original title can sometimes make a huge difference in the way the poem will be read.

You must identify the original source either at the beginning or end of the poem. (Sometimes putting it at the top ruins some poetic tension.) If the source is online, you could give a link for the reader to follow.

Found poetry is a great lesson for students because it forces them to focus on how word selection, titles and layout change the meaning of the words. Context changes everything - a good lesson for writer and reader.

There's a nice "lesson plan" on the Library of Congress website for using their vast collection in the American Memory collection (such as the Life Histories collected from 1936-1940) as starting places for your found poems.

With students, I have sometimes added additional levels of complexity - like asking that they find rhymes in the original and use them, or construct a poem in a form (sonnets etc.). You might raise the bar for your own attempt in the same way.

Here's an example poem from the Library of Congress site:

Found Poetry Based on Elsie Wall

from American Life Histories, 1936-1940

Rocks in her chair between supper and dinner,
thirty-two but looks forty-five.
Never learned how to chop in the garden,
never learned right how to pay at the store.

Rocks in her chair between supper and dinner,
children in rags lined up on the porch:
all she can count, all she can figure.
How can she clothe them to send them to school?

Daughters with bright eyes of Jean Harlow,
hang Jesus and movie stars framed on the walls.
Six dollars a week for six mouths in the family:
How will they work, get out of this town?

Jim works in the cotton mill, tends crops in the garden.
Elsie can cook if there's food in the house.
Pots catch the flow from the rainy roof leaks.
Rocks on her porch in rain or in fine.

An interesting lost and found project that has resulted in a magazine, several books and a website is Found Magazine.

They collect stuff (love letters, birthday cards, kids' homework, to-do lists, ticket stubs, poetry on napkins, doodles) that they and others have found (and submit to the magazine) as a way of getting a glimpse into someone else's life.

Sometimes the things tell a story. Sometimes they suggest a story for you to tell.

You might find some objects on their site to inspire your own found poems.

Their bound collections include Found Magazine #7: Feel A Connection,  Requiem for a Paper Bag: Celebrities and Civilians Tell Stories of the Best Lost, Tossed, and Found Items from Around the World, and anthologies like Found II.

Here's an example of a lost and found item from their site.

This 45 RPM record sleeve was found inside a used copy of Bob Dylan's Greatest Hits Vol. 2 that someone bought in a used record store.

Did the writer plan to give her that record? Did he give it to her and she sold it at the used record store, not even caring to keep the note - but also not destroying it?

The Longest Poem in the World?

It is "The Longest Poem in the World" - though some of you may question its claim to be a poem at all.

It is a kind of found poem made by aggregating real-time public Twitter updates and selecting those that rhyme. It a project of Andrei Gheorghe.

It is constantly growing at about 4000 lines per day.

If you click the ellipsis [...] at the bottom of the poem, you can see more of it.

What do you think - poem, or online tech babble?

It's too informal to be a renga, but perhaps it is a new form.