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Home News by Category General Updates Erasing Infinite Jest: Five Poetic Approaches

Erasing Infinite Jest: Five Poetic Approaches

Forgot I had this bookmarked! Check out this interesting article by Jenni B. Baker revealing some of the creative processes behind Erasing Infinite. (Here's my interview with Jenni from Aug '14)

Erasing Infinite Jest: Five Poetic Approaches:

[...]

Knowing how to erase the text is just the first step in the process — the bigger challenge comes in when I’m forced to “find” new poems in each page of Wallace’s novel, ones that aren’t simply distillations of the original text but which reinterpret, respond or react to it in new ways.

In an early iteration of this project, I attempted to craft poems from entire sections of the text at a time. This approach ultimately failed; I found myself reading the text and writing poems whose topics and tone were too close to those in the novel. I have to work one page at a time, removing each page’s contents from the book’s broader context, in order to divorce myself from the literal subject matter.
Once I’ve isolated a page for erasing, I usually apply one of five approaches to arrive at the final poem.

[...]

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Last Updated on Tuesday, 16 September 2014 12:12  

The Howling Fantods