Two at Five:2:One

The last two sets of my Eudora Welty erasures are now up at Five:2:One. Thanks so much to the staff for their support.

Star 82

The quirky and interesting online journal Star 82 has published my first erasures from Eudora Welty's story collection The Wide Net. This journal has all kinds of interesting work, including microfiction, photography, collage and more. Check out this collage by C. B. Auder, for example. There is a treasure trove of interesting art and writing in this issue, and in back issues. Enjoy.

Erasure in Taiwan

Asymptote has interviewed the editors of the Taiwanese poetry journal Xianzai Shi (Poetry Now) about their 9th issue (Feb. 2012) themed "Cross It Out," which featured erasure poetry. The erasures were initiated in an exhibit at the Contemporary Art Museum. Read about the various ways poets chose their source materials (including news reports, advertisement, and Jacques Derrida), as well as how crossing out an alphabetic language differs from erasing a logographic language. As Hsia Yu points out, "After crossing out an alphabetic language, you leave behind the sound; after you cross out logographic languages, you leave behind images. How would you want to translate sound? How would you want to translate images?"

Translation and erasure are further compared by Ling Yu, who says, "Between crossing out a language and translating a language, there is a subtle connection; Translation is sometimes just crossing out."

Besides exhibiting their work in a venue devoted to visual arts and thus further emphasizing the visual nature of erasure, the poets created a space where visitors could also experience making erasures for themselves. Some of these pieces were featured in the erasures issue of their magazine.

Having not thought before about the visual aspect of erasures culled from pieces written in a logographic language, I was intrigued by this article. Surveyors of erasure should enjoy this interview.

More Erasure by Ruefle

More erasure by Mary Ruefle, this time at Wag's Revue. It's called "Eyes for Everything."

For everything. Eyes. Yes.

Ruefle's New Erasure Online

Gwarlingo has published Mary Ruefle's new erasure, Melody: The Story of a Child, online here. In full. Don't miss it. Hauting and droll as ever, her erasures are.


Read about Mary Ruefle in particular and erasure in general at Gwarlingo here.

Erasure Links

Here are some of the links I provided for my Japan Writers Conference presentation on erasure. It might be useful to someone.

A.    A Humument by Tom Phillips www.humument.com 

B.     Wave Poetry (publisher of Mary Ruefle, and home of erasure software) http://www.wavepoetry.com/erasures/

C.     Mary Ruefle’s “The Mansion” http://maryruefle.com/the%20mansion.html

D.    Mary Ruefle’s “Marie” http://maryruefle.com/marie.html

E.      video from Free Verse: Erasure Poetry Festival:

                    http://channel.walkerart.org/play/free-verse-erasure-poetry-festival/

F.    The Found Poetry Review http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/

G.    Filter Literary Review http://filterlit.blogspot.com/

H.       One Drawing of Every Page of Moby-Dick, blog of Matt Kish, artist with a book of a similar title forthcoming from Tin House Books http://everypageofmobydick.blogspot.com/

I.       Copyright Term and Public Domain in the United States (Cornell University, as of January 2011)  http://copyright.cornell.edu/resources/publicdomain.cfm

J.    Public domain books online: http://www.gutenberg.org/, http://authorama.com/,

                        http://www.feedbooks.com/publicdomain, http://www.aozora.gr.jp/

K.     Collaborative erasures: http://www.logolalia.com/alteredbooks/

                    L. Use of government documents:
                http://gethelp.library.upenn.edu/PORT/documentation/copyright.html

M.    Fair use links: http://centerforsocialmedia.org/poetry, http://poetryfoundation.org/fairuse

Geist Erasure Trophy

Are you interested in erasure? Then Geist out of Canada has a great opportunity for you. (If you are unsure about what erasure is, see my previous post Erasurehead.)

The Geist Erasure Trophy is up for grabs. Just use their predetermined text, follow their rules about order of words and letters, and erase away. Click on the link to get full details.

First Prize gets $500 (Canadian, I'm sure) and the trophy. Second Place and Third Place get $150 and $100 respectively (probably still Canadian currency), and there are small gifts for Honorable Mention. Plus the entry fee entitles you to a one-year subscription to Geist (though I'm not sure how it will work for overseas submissions.)

So get going, American citizens, see how many trophies you can take from the Canadians this year (just kidding!).

Vinyl Poetry

It's embarrassing to do two self-promoting posts in a single day, but on the other hand, let's get it over with.

Vinyl Poetry Issue 3 is up and running. It includes some beautiful work by Ocean Vuong, Anna Journey, Jehanne Dubrow and many more (including four poems by me.)

One thing that attracted me to Vinyl Poetry is its interesting submissions policy. Most of the poems it publishes are solicited, but if you want to submit anyway, you send them links to your work online at other journals, and if they are interested, they will contact you to see new work.

Wave Books is a book publisher that used to have a similar policy, in which you sent them your latest book and they kept it on their bookshelves for a year. They'd contact you if they wanted to see new work. Recently it seems that they are closed to submissions, but I thought it was an interesting way to go (and they say to stay tuned for updated information concerning submissions.)

Wave Books also has an interesting section on their website devoted to erasures, which is a recent interest of mine (see an earlier post on February 13). You can make an erasure online using texts they've prepared, and you can also access a list of erasure poetry books.

Anyway, back to Vinyl, I sent them links to my online poems after a poet whose work I love appeared in their second issue, and they did contact me. So give it a try.

Check it out if you are so inclined.