/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.6971390]

In her recent found poetry project called Erasing Infinite, the poet Jenni B. Baker has created—or should I say found—a number of poems by deleting words from the pages of Infinite Jest. Baker herself calls the poems erasure poems, and some of them are surprisingly, well, poetical:

Everywhere the air is hollow, inflated with the heat of living.

or:

I feel the warm silver threads singing,
all feeling a fluttery little moth in a widow web

and:

Here is how to be sorry: Be sure you are.

Nice, right? Anyway, I was inspired by Baker’s project to create some found poetry of my own. But I didn’t just want to plagiarize her project, and since she had already thought of using the text of Infinite Jest as her reservoir of words, I thought I’d do something else. So I decided to use the paratexts of Infinite Jest as my reservoir text. Here’s a poem I came up with by erasing words from the paratexts of the first edition of Infinite Jest:

Pynchon, Pynchon, Thomas Pynchon.

And here’s another poem I created by erasing words from the paratexts of the first paperback edition of the novel:

Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon

And for my final performance this morning, a poem derived from the paratexts of the current paperback edition of the novel—the one that looks like a box of detergent:

Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon, Thomas Pynchon.

[Anonymous No.6971408]

This gimmick is getting old. Was perfected in A Humument