ERASUREATHON 2009 GO GO GO
ERASUREATHON
Erasure poetry is made when the poet selects a written work, removes parts, and what is left is the poem. It’s an excavation, an unfolding, a division, a recreation, a transformation. Your final product can be radically different from your original source - in fact it is bound to. Its final form can look like anything you want it to - Jan Bervin leaves all the text visible but makes the "erased" parts grey (an example is in the Radi Os link below), Ronald Johnson visually erases text entirely and leaves the gaps where they are so that the poem is made of words that float on the page, Tom Phillips paints art over the erased portions and leaves the text circled in little rivers that direct the flow of the reading.
ERASURE RULES: 1) There are no rules. This is a crazy art form; any ideas of "writing" are meant to be flouted.
2) Maybe there is sort of one unwritten rule, and that is: don’t add your own words. Stick with what the text gives you.
EXAMPLES: for fanfiction erasures, lassiterfics and I erased each other's Merlin fic:
- writhe, lassiterfics's erasure of Rewriting the Old Language
- Then Sing, zempasuchil's erasure of The Ink Still Drying
More famously,
- Radi Os, Ronald Johnson’s erasure of the first four books of Paradise Lost
See the first page
- A Humument, Tom Phillips’ erasure of the Victorian novel A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, has seen four editions and over half its pages recreated since Phillips started the project 30+ years ago
The official website - contains images of all the pages from the first edition (1970-75), and a slide show of the entire fourth edition (2005)
A few neat pages: erasing into music, making new words, a sex scene
HOW THIS EXCHANGE WORKS
REQUIREMENTS: To participate in the exchange, you must have at least 2000 words written in at least one fandom. When signing up, please lease list as many fandoms as possible that you’d be willing to erase from. Ideally, the fandom wouldn’t matter much, because the erasure you’re producing doesn’t necessarily have to have anything to do with that fandom.
HOW TO: You sign up using the form in the signup post (the next post in this comm), we assign you an author, and you pick work from their specified fandom to erase. Total text you are working from must be at least 2000 words. You can compile pieces to make a larger body of text if you want. There is no length requirement for your final erasure.
TIMELINE: Signups open till Sat July 25 midnight
Assignments sent within the week (starting Sun July 26 - Sat Aug 1 at the latest)
Deadline at Sat Aug 29th midnight - post your erasures to this community (join to post) by then
QUESTIONS: just leave a comment in this post! we’ll get back to you asap!
Erasure poetry is made when the poet selects a written work, removes parts, and what is left is the poem. It’s an excavation, an unfolding, a division, a recreation, a transformation. Your final product can be radically different from your original source - in fact it is bound to. Its final form can look like anything you want it to - Jan Bervin leaves all the text visible but makes the "erased" parts grey (an example is in the Radi Os link below), Ronald Johnson visually erases text entirely and leaves the gaps where they are so that the poem is made of words that float on the page, Tom Phillips paints art over the erased portions and leaves the text circled in little rivers that direct the flow of the reading.
ERASURE RULES: 1) There are no rules. This is a crazy art form; any ideas of "writing" are meant to be flouted.
2) Maybe there is sort of one unwritten rule, and that is: don’t add your own words. Stick with what the text gives you.
EXAMPLES: for fanfiction erasures, lassiterfics and I erased each other's Merlin fic:
- writhe, lassiterfics's erasure of Rewriting the Old Language
- Then Sing, zempasuchil's erasure of The Ink Still Drying
More famously,
- Radi Os, Ronald Johnson’s erasure of the first four books of Paradise Lost
See the first page
- A Humument, Tom Phillips’ erasure of the Victorian novel A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, has seen four editions and over half its pages recreated since Phillips started the project 30+ years ago
The official website - contains images of all the pages from the first edition (1970-75), and a slide show of the entire fourth edition (2005)
A few neat pages: erasing into music, making new words, a sex scene
HOW THIS EXCHANGE WORKS
REQUIREMENTS: To participate in the exchange, you must have at least 2000 words written in at least one fandom. When signing up, please lease list as many fandoms as possible that you’d be willing to erase from. Ideally, the fandom wouldn’t matter much, because the erasure you’re producing doesn’t necessarily have to have anything to do with that fandom.
HOW TO: You sign up using the form in the signup post (the next post in this comm), we assign you an author, and you pick work from their specified fandom to erase. Total text you are working from must be at least 2000 words. You can compile pieces to make a larger body of text if you want. There is no length requirement for your final erasure.
TIMELINE: Signups open till Sat July 25 midnight
Assignments sent within the week (starting Sun July 26 - Sat Aug 1 at the latest)
Deadline at Sat Aug 29th midnight - post your erasures to this community (join to post) by then
QUESTIONS: just leave a comment in this post! we’ll get back to you asap!