I’ve been doing a series of artworks based on Emily Brontë’s novel, Wuthering Heights. Some of them have a feminist bend, some are about someone I lost (who loved this book). Most are pretty nightmarish. Whether you call them collages, blackout poems, or visual meditations, it does my soul good to do them.
This one was from an introduction by Currer Bell (Charlotte Brontë) from a very old copy I’ve been working from. This, like many others, is a combination of handmade materials and digital enhancement. This started out with meditative, modulated pencil work. William Blake meets art deco airbrush meets Xerox machine.
Among other things, I’m searching for a unique visual approach to erasure art, and allowing text to show through, multiple readings, is also part of the practice, as you’ll see on my “garbage dump” page. It may not be “erasure poetry” at all, but I’m more interested in the journey than the destination (name), or aspiring to be like something else. And if you can make anything look remotely original in this post-modern era, just yay! Most of the work is jolie laide or art brut. I try to avoid “designing” or being illustrative, although this one could go that way.
View more erasure poems here or on my thrown-together, temporary gallery. Thank you to the journals who have published them (diode, Anvil Tongue, Up the Staircase Poetry, Harpy Hybrid Review). I also have several forthcoming from (Re)Ideas and in Permafrost’s next print journal. Check out the (Re)Ideas on here.
