Sherry Chandler

This is how the pros do it:

Ruth Bavetta, an honorary Kentucky poet by virtue of her relationship to Gin Petty and me, is the person who introduced me to this idea of White Out poetry. She’s been working on a booklength White Out project, Secrets, and has agreed to let me post one page of it here. Secrets was created as an exercise in a workshop with Sarah Maclay. Ruth tells me that Sarah got the idea from Mary Reufle.

Ruth has the advantage, perhaps, of being a visual artist as well as a poet. She worked with a picture book – a yoga instruction manual – that she picked up someplace like the Good Will. Not only did she white out words – and the lower case is appropriate because, in such a big project, Ruth soon abandoned quick-thickening Liquid Paper for white acrylic paint – but she also blacked out the human figures to make silhouettes and then added bits of color.

When I asked her about the project, Ruth observed:

Some of the people in my group just used the book as a source for the words and order, which they then extracted to form a poem on a clean sheet of paper. Certainly shows how my thinking tends to veer off in odd directions.

Vive l’oddity! Although I like the simplicity of what I achieved with simple text on paper, one of the things I liked most about the exercise was the way it moved away from the linearity of most poetry. Ruth has taken this a step further.

My WaMo colleagues are working with books this weekend. Exciting to think what they may produce.

I’ve chosen “Triangle” to post here because it is very simple and will not overtax your monitor. I’ve put all my talking beforehand so as not to distract you from the thing itself. Click the image to see it full-sized.