Just as (we are told) there are no atheists in foxholes, so the erasure poet comes to believe that there are no truly prosaic passages in a passage of prose. You can only look at arrangements of words on a page for so long before you completely lose track of which are the expected sentiments, the set phrases. Strangeness affects them all. You look deeper: within words, and between words widely separated on the page. New possible poems spark with electricity, like Frankenstein’s monster just before full reanimation. But it’s a zero-sum game: for one poem to open, countless others must remain closed. Syntax, like time, only flows in one direction. Knowing this, you hesitate over the source text. The poems are parallel universes, each with their own laws. And as in physics, any pretense of the observer to a god-like standing above the observed phenomenon is impossible; to observe is to recognize, and to recognize is to implicate oneself in an inherently contingent origin. Perhaps the Daoists are right, and the only perfect art object is the uncarved block.
OTHER POSTS IN THE SERIES
- Delusions of an erasure poet: the shadow text
- Delusions of an erasure poet: the observer effect
- Delusions of an erasure poet: invention is discovery
- Delusions of a erasure poet: the marksman
I like this observation. Of course, I’ve never been able to leave the blank surface alone either.
Boy howdy, I hadn’t considered how erasure poetry would change someone’s whole approach to text, but it’s inevitable, isn’t it? You’ll never be able to un-rewire your brain now.