A phantom grace: three blackout/erasures of Sylvia Plath poems

Source material: Sylvia Plath’s Sleep in the Mojave Desert from Crossing the Water

Source material: Sylvia Plath's Flute Notes from a Reedy Pond

Source material: Sylvia Plath's Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest

Scribble the Holy Contour

Scribble everything!

Get drunk with your life, its own visionary tics, the true

story of the world interior – jewel center

of recollection. 

Swim in language,

in the holy contour of life

emblazoned in praise

of wild, undisciplined time.

Bits and pieces culled from Jack Kerouac's 30 Writing Tips

Erasure of Neruda's Epithalamium

At first I did not see you: I did not know

  your           presence:

  

the shouts of the wind in the shadow.

Do you remember

how sleep grew

in you,

      how  

               the wind

  

echoed  

      its secret syllable

  

and all things spoke 

of the seed that half opens?

Your name is on the petals

of the rose that grows on the stone,

       a scarlet mouth  

deciphers your name:

  

    broken window

crazy with light.  

Ghost Priest

A sliding haze

in dark-webbed branches



     wavering gauze-edged, inhabited

     by a voice furred with frost,



a haunt of gilded questions.

love gnaws me


     a phantom

     grace             splits from that pale mist.







*Illustration of erasure*


An erasure of Sylvia Plath's Dialogue Between Ghost and Priest

Sleep

Out here,


             It is dangerous.



mad men inhabit the blue hour,



glittery fictions glide

In the crevice of shadow


comfortless as firedogs in the wind.


here,

heat-cracked crickets

creep into our hair.

 
 
 
*
 
 
 
Erasure of Sylvia Plath's Sleep in the Mojave Desert from Crossing the Water

Wicked Expeditions - a found poem tribute

Wicked expeditions

   seizing
 
        wild   bitter greens

the blistered brine     still lives in me.

I praise   wild

   bristly chicories.


I linger lost to blossom,


sap & seed.










Thank you, Dana Tommasino, for the essay at Narrative, Primal.

Erasures

Follow this link to construct your own erasures online.

Smudges - an erasure

The first morning:

those first disquieting hours

trying to distract myself,

wandering, listening, wondering how

we still know less than nothing.



I never realized

how everything is permeated,

the heavy noontime air

alive with shimmers and mirages.



However much we didn't want to,

however little we would do about it,

we'd understood: we were going to perish

of all this, if not now, then soon, if not soon,

then someday.


I remember

starlings beneath the eaves,

carats of nightfall,

every sidewalk scribbled with hearts.











Source text: Tar by C.K. Williams.

Paradise Lost: an erasure

Restore us, chaos

I invoke thy Song,

       
the vast in me is dark.



Nine times the Space that measures 

Day and Night:



Let us not slip.



Let us rest if any rest can harbour there.