A new digital commission by Faye Latham.
[The world...its bulb] by Faye Latham ©Faye Latham
Faye Latham is a writer and visual poet, born in North Wales and now based in the Lake District. This new piece of work, ‘[The World…its bulb]’ is an erasure and found poem made using two pages from F. S. Smythe’s A Kangchenjunga Adventure, written in 1931. The two pages sit alongside each other – the left hand side is an erasure poem and the right hand side is made through found poem techniques and the newly formed pages work together to create one poem:
“The world / is / Far away now, / strung up like a row of pendant black beads. / OR / very / close, / a / garden / shrunk into its bulb.”
Erasure poetry is quite literally the process of erasing, covering or otherwise obscuring selected words from an existing text to create a new poem from the ones left untouched. Found poetry is a type of poetry created by taking words and phrases from other sources and reframing them into something new. Erasure and found poetry forms can be used as means of collaboration, or to confront the ideas expressed by another author.
On the left hand side, Latham has created a poem by erasing words on the page with black and white swirls. The right hand side features a found poem, where words have been selected from elsewhere in Smythe’s book and collaged into a new poem. In each case, paint, scissors and glue are used as tools of both destruction and creation and the landscape of the page is altered irrevocably.
Latham’s debut poetry collection, British Mountaineers, was shortlisted for the 2023 Boardman Tasker Award for Mountain Literature and contains over 60 erasure poems and explores the history of mountaineering as well as gender and politics. Latham is currently working on new visual poetry made using A Kangchenjunga Adventure, to explore the environmental implications of erasure. Alongside this, she is re-writing the myth of Blodeuwedd as an epic poem.
