Chaganti, Seeta. "Erasure poetry exercise: Chaucer’s The House of Fame." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/erasure-poetry-exercise-chaucers-the-house-of-fame. [Date accessed].
Erasure poetry exercise: Chaucer’s The House of Fame
A student exercise using erasure poetry to interrogate Chaucer's text.
For this exercise, I suggest focusing on lines 239-381 of The House of Fame, Chaucer’s retelling of Virgil’s Dido and Aeneas account. It can be done with other sections of the text as well. (Large Chaucer classes that break into sections especially benefit from graduate TA’s who are creative writers in completing this exercise, and I encourage drawing upon their expertise in discussing poetic composition with students.)
After the class reads and considers the Virgilian context, the Chaucerian retelling, the medieval approach to source adaptation, and Jordan Abel’s modern creative technique of source adaption, students create their own erasure poem using The House of Fame as their source text.
Some questions for them to consider as they approach this task
Abel’s work ranges from preserving full sentences and phrases to preserving single isolated words and even, in some cases, only punctuation marks. What do you think the purpose and impact of these different levels of erasure might be?
What role do you think the empty space plays in Abel’s poems? How would you relate the use of empty space here to other discussions of poetic form in the class?
With these thoughts in mind, what do you want to do in your own poem? How might your erasures reflect your thoughts about what Chaucer is doing to Virgil’s source, about the representation of Dido through these different lenses, about Dido as powerful or powerless, about Dido as racialized, or about the intersection of these different concepts? Do you think erasure creates a means to hear Dido’s own voice? Why or why not, and how might your poem reflect your opinion?
It can be useful to set certain limits to give students something interesting to think about as they are working. I’ve noticed that students who are still a little shaky in their Middle English will do things like leave the word “grave” in their erasure poem but treat it as a noun rather than the verb that it is. While doing so looks cool, I’ve realized that I can’t quite tell if they have done that intentionally or in error. I specify that nouns should stay nouns and verbs should stay verbs in their erasure poem, and let them try out composing with that constraint. They might also append a note explaining that they have changed a part of speech for a specific reason.
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