A Single Drop Was Full erasure poetry by Shirley Glubka 20 poems + art Blade of Grass Press 2022 $9.00 Click here to order paperback. |
In her third collection of erasure poetry, Shirley Glubka tries something new, pairing each poem, once written, with a painting. For this reversal of the ekphrastic process (when a poem is written in response to a work of visual art) Glubka has chosen paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, Edvard Munch, Georgia O'Keefe, Agnes Pelton, and others. The result is a meditative blend by a philosophically inclined poet. The 20 erasure poems in A Single Drop Was Full are derived from the works of Isaac Babel, Georg Büchner, Paul Celan, Stephen Crane, Knut Hamsun, and Lucretius.
FROM THE AUTHORS' PREFACE
For over two decades, retired from my work as a psychotherapist, I have had abundant time to read, abundant time to write. My reading mind and my writing mind are now so woven into each other that I can sometimes barely tell one from the other. This is certainly true with the erasures. What I am reading quite literally becomes what I write. Pages from a speech by Paul Celan or a novel by Georg Büchner become—radically excerpted—a new thing: a poem that somehow, mysteriously, emerges. Did I write that? Did Celan, or Büchner? But as Travis MacDonald, an early erasurist, once said: "the final work belongs to neither creator so much as the liminal space that arises between."
That liminal space pulsates. I have come to feel that it holds a more complex gestalt than might be obvious, a lively amalgam of many minds, all stirring behind the veil. I am thinking of the reading I've been doing in recent decades, especially the poetry, the philosophy—and spiritual texts that reach around or behind any particular religion or theology and touch the heart of something mystical. So I want to say that A Single Drop Was Full, which is my unexpected late-life little book, a gift to a writer if ever there was one, came not only out of a dance between the source text writers and me, but also from the works of Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, Iris Murdoch, Evelyn Underhill, Martin Buber, David Mutschlecner, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anne Carson, and Gjertrud Schnackenberg—to name a few. I am deeply, intensely grateful to all. SAMPLE POEM + ART
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