Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.” FRANZ KAFKA
Artwork: “Flowers” (1964) by Andy Warhol
Archives for posts with tag: classic authors
“She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.”
MARK TWAIN, Following the Equator
Painting: “Girl with Parrots” by Walasse Ting
THE OCEAN
Moby-Dick Erasure Poem
by Thomas R. Thomas
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Thomas R. Thomas was born in Los Angeles and grew up in the San Gabriel Valley west of LA. Currently, he lives in Long Beach, California. For his day job, he is a software QA Analyst. He volunteers for Tebot Bach, a community poetry organization, in Huntington Beach. Thomas has been published in Don’t Blame the Ugly Mug: 10 Years of 2 Idiots Peddling Poetry, Creepy Gnome, Carnival, Pipe Dream, Bank Heavy Press, Conceit Magazine, Electric Windmill & Marco Polo, and the Silver Birch Press Summer Anthology. In November 2012, Carnival released his eChapbook, Scorpio, and Washing Machine Press released a chapbooklette calledTanka. In 2013, World Parade Books will publish a book of his poetry. Visit his website at thomasrthomas.org.
There are neither good nor bad subjects. From the point of view of pure Art, you could almost establish it as an axiom that the subject is irrelevant, style itself being an absolute manner of seeing things.” GUSTAVE FLAUBERT
Photo: John Payne
THE OCEAN
Moby-Dick Erasure Poem
by Thomas R. Thomas
We celebrate Herman Melville’s 194th birthday today with an erasure poem based on the opening page of Melville’s masterwork, Moby-Dick, courtesy of source material and erasure software at Wave Books.
CALL ME PARTICULAR
Erasure Poem by Silver Birch Press
In honor of the mighty Melville’s birthday, we invite our readers to create their own Moby-Dick-inspired erasure poems and email them to silver@silverbirchpress.com. We promise to post your creations! Get started at this link.
ABOUT HERMAN MELVILLE: Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American writer best known for the novel Moby-Dick. His first three books gained contemporary attention (the first, Typee, became a bestseller), but after literary success in the late 1840s, his popularity declined in the mid-1850s and never recovered during his lifetime. When he died in 1891, he was almost completely forgotten. It was not until the “Melville Revival” in the early 20th century that his work won recognition, especially Moby-Dick, which was hailed as one of the literary masterpieces of both American and world literature. He was the first writer to have his works collected and published by the Library of America. (Read more at Wikipedia.org.)
We’ve just received another response to our call for erasure poems — the remarkable “Beginnings” by Anna Badua, based on text from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Badua typed out the text and then “erased” words using Illustrator software.
HERE IS THE ORIGINAL TEXT (from Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad):
HERE IS THE ERASURE POEM…
BEGINNINGS
by Anna Badua
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Anna Badua‘s newly released chapbook Life Forms is available through Bank-Heavy Press. Her work has also appeared or is forthcoming in Lummox Journal, San Pedro River Review, Pearl, Chiron Review and many others. She lives in Long Beach, California.
For a fun frolic into the world of erasure poetry, visit the wonderful Wave Books site — and create an erasure poem with ease.
Visit erasures.wavepoetry.com.
Below is my humble offering (taken from MOBY DICK by Herman Melville).
ORIGINAL TEXT:
MY ERASURE POEM, “Moby Money”:
Try it yourself!
Send in your erasure poems and we’ll publish them on our blog!
Happy erasing!
WRITING ADVICE FROM FRANZ KAFKA: “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion.”
ARTWORK: “Butterfly” by Andy Warhol
Note: In ancient Greek, the word for butterfly is “Psyche,” a term now equated with “soul.”
Download Kafka’s classic tale of transformation, THE METAMORPHOSIS, for free at gutenberg.org.
“Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.”
FRANZ KAFKA
Artwork: “Flowers” (1964) by Andy Warhol
Silver Birch Press 