Sarah-Jane Crowson contributed four erasures to Issue 33, which can be found here.
We’d love to hear more about this set of erasures.
Part of my motivation as a visual poet is the ability this offers to reinvent existing text and change it. Sometimes, for me, this is about creating a space of resistance or subverting existing narratives – taking, say, a colonial narrative and creating from it something which works against that colonial space. For these poems it was different. One of the sources was written by a favourite children’s author; I wanted to revisit the magic of her words. The other three are from a mid nineteenth century natural history of the seaside. Whilst working on these, I became fond of the voice of the Victorian author as I read through the book– whilst the tone was ‘paterfamilias’ the book was pure storytelling; genuine, charming and evocative. So I worked ‘with’ the words, trying to bring out connections in the text, sympathetic to how the author described the magic of the seashore, re-creating their words as poetry to bring out the hidden magic; the feel of the book.
What was the most difficult part in creating this particular set?
Too much choice! Sometimes with erasure poems I find myself hunting around for interesting words, but there is so much interesting and vivid vocabulary in the source texts that I had to make difficult choices about which to keep and which to lose. Making the shell creature in ‘The Conchologist’ was also technically quite tricky as it started off being very large and dominant, and I had to keep scratching into it and playing with transparency settings to let it work.
Recommend a book for us which was published within the last decade.
I recommend ‘Holloway’ by Robert Macfarlane. I love all of Macfarlane’s work, but Holloway is something special; it blurs the intersections of past and present, but doesn’t forget real-life human stories. It’s, for me, a quietly extraordinary exploration of the hollowed out sunken lanes which thread the UK and which represent, in their physical geography, lived histories of communities and people.
If you could have a drink with any living author, who would it be? Why?
Forgive me, but I can’t name just one. I’m part of various lively poetic communities on various online platforms (from social media through to traditional poetry boards) and I’d want to bring all my friends together in a physical space for one giant picnic to argue about poetry and share our work (perhaps over champagne?).
What are you working on now? What’s next?
I’ve just published a small booklet of visual poetry with Rare Swan Press who will be releasing ‘The Zodiacal Light’ in Autumn 2022. And I’ve started work on a series of collage images based on old postcards I found in a charity shop. I’m still exploring the central idea, but I think it will be imagined deities/combinations of mythological figures inhabiting landscapes that are almost (but not quite) real.
Our thanks to Sarah-Jane for taking the time to answer a few questions and share this work. Find Crowson’s four erasures here: https://www.sequestrum.org/fiction-hunters.
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Sarah-Jane’s work is inspired by fairytales, nature, psychogeography and surrealism. She uses bricolage to explore the space between real and imagined; creating alternative narratives as small acts of resistance. Sarah-Jane’s work can be seen in various journals, including Rattle, Petrichor, Sugar House Review and Penn Review. You can find her on Twitter @Sarahjfc or on her website at www.sarahjanecrowson.art