Day 5: Erasure Poetry
🏴 Cerddi dileu
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“I'm Rachel and I run boom saloon, a global media movement to democratise creativity for good. Boom Saloon work in collaboration with STAND, a peer support group for people living with young onset dementia - that is people who are diagnosed with dementia under the age of 65 - and their families and friends in Fife, Scotland. Boom Saloon have been working with STAND since 2019 to support them tell the true story of those living with young onset dementia, in their own words ."
This prompt was greatly loved the dementia groups we have worked with previously – it removes the pressure of memory and having to imagine your own words whilst simultaneously sparking new ideas from what is presented. Any source material whatsoever can be used, from greetings cards to comic books to Farmfoods flyers! We ran an impromptu, communal Erasure poetry session at the Dementia Arts Festival in 2023 which was very popular and this prompt can easily be enjoyed by more than one person at once.
To find out more about boom saloon visit: https://64millionartists.com/boom-saloon
Instagram: @boomsaloon
Website: boomsaloon.com
Do
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Erasure poetry is created by blacking out words to form new sentences, poems and stories from what remains. It allows us to play with words without the pressure of having to think of them from scratch. Instead, we can enjoy restructuring and playing with words which already exist to tell our own stories.
Tear out a page from a newspaper, magazine or book. If you don’t have any to hand – you could print out a selection from the resources linked here, or a place of your choice. Use a marker pen to cross out the words surrounding those you wish to remain. It can be helpful to first underline the words you wish to remain, before then blacking out all of the others.
If you'd like, add in any additional words around those you've selected.
Think
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Terms such as poetry and creative writing can feel incredibly daunting – they are filled with stanzas and haikus and villanelles, written by people such as Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Yeats. And yet... at their core, they are nothing more than the words we each use day in, day out. These three Word Play prompts encourage and guide you to think about the words that surround us each day and how we can play with them to discover that, in fact – we are all poets, even if we didn't know it!
Share
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