Now this is cool. A solution to two problems at once.
a) How to format online text with spaces in poetry without a huge amount of characters, and
b) to do erasure poetry without an image that would be slow to load.
Mairead Byrne takes a news story and just changes the text color to white except what remains for the poem. Elegant, simple solution.
The blog generally has interesting things to say, and is a link or two away from e-x-c-h-a-n-g-e-v-a-l-u-e-s of interviews of poets about poetics by Tom Beckett. Like Jordan Stempleman saying,
I’d look down upon the parents for not reading poetry to their kids when they were very young while they were on the toilet. It’s the best place, you got ‘em, and they have this wonderful look of concentration on their face. […]
My daughter, now three and a half, each time she sits down for an extended stay on the toilet will call me in from the other room and ask me to read her poetry. Now granted, she usually stops me at every fourth or fifth word to ask me what it means or to laugh and repeat it because sonically it just sounds wild, but that’s great stuff, no? Adults are way too freaked out to do those kinds of things. Workshop students better find the paradigmatic happenings in the poem or it’s strike three! My readers tend to be those who don’t worry so much about cracking anything. They connotatively feel the language and respond. At least that’s what the one reader I know I have does.
One last thing, Paul Hostovsky’s poems in Umbrella — love their whimsy. They’ve got a Tom Wayman-likeness to their narratives. But of a whole other character and not to be missed is Christina Pocosz, an excerpt,
Remember the iridescent
plumage of the hummingbird
is black
without the light.
Black like a branch
bereft of the life of the living
leaves, charcoal waiting
for the flame.
The cadence word and image reach me in concert, a knot of carollers when I least expect it on a snowy afternoon.