A Portfolio of Erasures by Carrie Green


A Process Note

These poems are erasures of The New Etiquette: The Modern Code of Social Behavior by Margery Wilson (Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1937) and The Baffle Book by Lassiter Wren and Randle McKay (Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1928).

I first began making erasures in 2020 as a way to avoid the blank page. Later, I tried collaging them but found I didn’t much enjoy the process. Embroidery feels much more meditative, and in the case of The New Etiquette, more suited to the source text.

The process of making these forces me to be more improvisational and to accept the imperfections of messy stitches and torn paper.


Memory_TQ_compressed


Carrie Green is the author of Studies of Familiar Birds: Poems (Able Muse Press, 2020). She earned her MFA at McNeese State University in Lake Charles, Louisiana, and has received grants from the Kentucky Foundation for Women, the Kentucky Arts Council, and the Louisiana Division of the Arts. Her poems have appeared in American Life in Poetry, Verse Daily, Terrain, Poetry Northwest, DIAGRAM, and many other journals. She reads for the Beloit Poetry Journal.