As if a mind / folded in thought / created forms—

(likenesses)
(flowers)
(flames)  

(a field)
(a dream)
(the sun)

(a round of return)
(a hold against chaos)

striving—
primordial—

from which: world—

battling, inarticulate—
blindly making / only beauty.

Source: Robert Duncan’s Often I Am Permitted to Return to a Meadow & Poetry, A Natural Thing

Method: I often think my erasures might better be called pluckings. I go through a text and “pluck” words and phrases that call to me. I look for energy, vividness, peculiarity. I might go back, pluck more, for sense, or because the developing poem wants more, sees more, begins to understand itself. I hone. My rule: keep everything in the exact order and the exact form (verb form, pronoun gender, etc.) that the source text dictates; no rearranging; no cheating.

Shirley Glubka is a retired psychotherapist, the author of three poetry collections and two novels. Her most recent book: The Bright Logic of Wilma Schuh: a novel (Blade of Grass Press, 2017). Shirley lives in Prospect, Maine with her spouse, Virginia Holmes. Website: http://shirleyglubka.weebly.com/