18/19 May 2017

Today our class was lucky to spend time with writer and educator Mary Rechner, who engaged students with a poetry lesson to extend our consideration of key themes in Station Eleven. The lesson focuses on the concept of erasure. Students began by writing from the perspective of a character from the novel, considering what that character might miss from "before" the epidemic.

Next, students worked in groups as members of a kind of Travelling Symphony. Groups were assigned a poem to rehearse and perform, giving a reading of the piece that conveys the poem's meaning. Poems include the following:

"Life on Mars," David Bowie
"The Museum of Obsolescence," Tracy K. Smith
"City That Does Not Sleep," Federico Garcia Lorca
"Poetry of Departures," Phillip Larkin
"The Summer Day," Mary Oliver
"Campo dei Fiori," Czeslaw Miloz

After performances, Mary Rechner introduced students to the concept of erasure as a poetic technique, reading selections from the work poet Robin Coste Lewis (author of Voyage of the Sable Venus). (https://literary-arts.org/archive/robin-coste-lewis/)

As a class, we examined a range of examples of erasure poems (Coste Lewis’s slide show of examples of erasure in poetry can be viewed at http://literary-arts.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/Lewis-Final-Race-Within-Erasure_low-res.pdf).

Students then used their freewrites and the poems they worked with to create erasure poems of their own. At the end of class, students shared their work with their peers.

To take it further, listen to Coste’s Portland Arts & Lectures lecture about erasure and poetry on the Archive Project https://literary-arts.org/archive/robin-coste-lewis/