Posted on

New Books in Poetry: all this can be yours by Isobel O’Hare

all this can be yours-Isobel OHare

My latest interview with Isobel O’Hare is up at the New Books in Poetry podcast and ready for listing!

Isobel O’Hare’s all this can be yours (University of Hell Press, 2019) presents a series of erasures crafted from celebrity sexual assault apologies. These poems offer fierce explorations of the truth hidden behind apologies intended to explain away or dilute culpability, rather than accept responsibility. The result is a powerful collection that opens up a wider conversation surrounding sexual assault and the need for change on a systemic level.

I was also excited to learn that the interview has been featured on LitHub!

Here’s a bit from O’Hare during the interview:

Erasure poetry for me started out as a magical, playful, light-hearted exercise to jog the brain, to sort of get me thinking differently. And it also started out as a conversation with someone else’s work, and sort of a reverent one—approaching someone’s work with great respect and the desire to bring something out of it that might be hidden beneath the surface. There are lots of methods of doing that—I’ve used whiteout in past erasures, and I’ve done blackout with Sharpie. I’ve experimented with cutting words out.

The idea is you’re removing something—or you’re not removing something. Jen Bervin had a really interesting term for it . . . something like restitution. It’s a really interesting word for what you’re doing with erasure, which is not necessarily removing something, but bringing something forward. So it’s not always you violently attacking someone else’s work, which it can feel like sometimes, but you’re allowing things to bubble up to the surface that may not have been apparent before.

Newsletter | Twitter | Instagram

Posted on

So, I Launched a Kickstarter

[kickstarter url=https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/andreablythe/make-100-a-fearless-chapbook-of-erasure-poetry width=500]

For January, Kickstarter is hosting the make/100 challenge — essentially urging creators to created a limited edition something (100 tee shirts, 100 sculptures, etc.). It’s concept I found fascinating and I really wanted to participate when they launched the challenge last year, but I had too many projects going on at the time and it didn’t work out. So, this year I was determined to put a project together.

After thinking about what would work best, I decided to do an extension of a 30/30 poetry challenge I did in April, in which I created 30 new erasure poems based on Trader Joe’s Fearless Flyer as source material.

The Kickstarter project — A Fearless Chapbook of Erasure Poetry —  is to print a limited-edition chapbook of erasure poetry, compiling 20 of these already completed poems and 20 new poems that I am making during the course of the project.

I wanted to keep it simple, so I have only three reward levels:

  • $1+ — get a pdf of the chapbook and a thank you on my website
  • $10+ — get a signed print copy of the chapbook
  • $40+ — get an original of one of the erasures I create, in addition to everything else

Simplicity seems the best way for me to make it through the challenge with the least amount of stress (especially considering all the other projects I have going on simultaneously).

I’m trying to approach it in such a way that I’m asking for money without directly asking for money. Essentially, by posting a new erasure poem every day with a link to the Kickstarter included, I’m hoping that it will draw enough attention to achieve my goal.

So far, this idea is working well — I’m four days in and have achieved 26% of my goal. Yay! Although, I have a feeling I may need to be more direct as the project goes on… kind of like this:

If you have a buck or two to spend on some poetry, I would be thrilled if you could head on over and back my project.

(Whew. Not so hard.)

Anyway, it’s a strange, fun experience so far (making the video was a journey in itself), and I’m excited to see how it will all turn out.

My day three poem:

STONE

 

Linky Goodness

“I’m decades in to being a poet, but it continues to hurt to write them,” notes Karen Craigo in her excellent post, When the poems don’t come.