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  • Welcome
  • About
  • Books
    • We Face The Tremendous Meat On The Teppan
    • Where I Was Born
    • Mother Said, I Want Your Pain
    • Silver Seasons of Heartache
    • Home, No Home
    • Cochlea
    • GLYPH: Graphic Poetry = Trans. Sensory
  • Graphic Poetry
    • Gallery of Graphic Poems
    • 31 Facts about GLYPH
    • Listen to graphic poems
    • Interview Project
    • Warashibe Documentary
      • First Erasure
      • First Found Poem
    • Study Guide
      • What is Trans. Sensory
      • Create a first graphic poem
      • How to Approach Image
      • line-breaks
      • Visual Erasure Poetry
  • Translation
    • Conveyorize Art of Translation
    • Waka Workshop
    • 百人一首
  • Gallery
    • working on
    • Other Goings On
    • Something is Going On

My First Visual Erasure Poem

I teach visual erasure poems.

I also write reviews on visual erasure poetry books in journals and magazines.

Examples of Visual Erasure Poets:
  • Kylie Gellatly
  • Sarah Sloat
  • Jennifer Sperry Steinorth​
  • Kelsey Zimmerman

I learn their visual poetry approaches:
  • Following their Instagram feeds
  • Interviewing them
  • Writing essays and articles

I learned so many things about visual erasure poems; however, I have NEVER MADE ONE!

(I thought that erasure poetry needed advanced English skills, and I had never thought that I qualify.)

I know, I KNOW that it is a dangerous thought.

When Francesca Preston sent me the following poem, I thought,

IT IS TIME TO CREATE MY OWN ERASURE POEM!
Picture
LEFT: Original Text by Francesca Preston. RIGHT: My Erasure Poem (Feb 2022)
I used origami paper strips because I wanted to keep the original "glitter" idea as a colorful background. I also thought that it might be interesting to create an origami doll from this paper after erasing words.

Why did I make the erasure poem into an origami doll?

In January 2022, I was obsessed with creating origami dolls, and I started shipping these paper girls to my closest friends and family.
My mother said,

​"Are you sending out trash!?

I replied, "It can go anywhere with one stamp!"

​So, the idea of "Litter" came from our conversation. 
This February, I started receiving thank-you gifts from people who received "Litter".

​This time my mother proclaimed, "You are a Warashibe Choja!"

(This in reference to a Japanese folk tale about a man who becomes a millionaire through a series of successive trades, starting with a single piece of straw.)

Indeed, I received quite good gifts (Naoko's evil laugh).
Picture
Final product of my visual erasure, "[G]Litter"
Picture

When I showed my first erasure poem to Francesca Preston, she replied with the following slideshow.

Here is another Warashibe Choja moment: She used my full-length book "Where I Was Born" (2019, Willow Books) to create an erasure poem.

I like several of her photos; especially 'Process 2' and 'Final Product' due to their unique adaptations. This is the part of the erasure process I most enjoy.
Francesca Preston's process note:
When I figure out which words I'm going to use I just do it in my mind first - I see what pulls me. It takes me a few read-throughs, but generally it's very fast.

The hardest moment was actually the title - I ended up choosing "A PART" for its two meanings, "apart" and "a part." But in my heart I want to call the piece "Us Yellow Cabs"


It was very important to me that the words retain the spatial awareness/location from [Naoko's] poem. 

In the end, I saved the cut-out words, and those can be used for endless new arrangements and poems. (Using John Cage sort of chance, for instance).
​
Just seeing where they fall on the floor...

Picture
Origami Dolls
You may also like reading about Visual Found Poem
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