Almost any block of expressive English-language prose I’ve ever examined can be found to include one or more poems containing some reasonably sound and original insight, metaphor, or word-play. This is so persistently amazing to me as their discoverer that I am tempted to speculate that truths about the human condition might actually be encoded within the language itself!

But then I come down to earth and remember that this maybe only works because English grammar is so stripped-down and flexible. It’s worth speculating in how many other languages erasure poetry would even be feasible for more than a few heroic, novelty efforts. I refer to this suitability for erasure poetry as shlang, a word embedded in the phrase English language. A highly inflected language such as Russian could be said to have little shlang, whereas one with no real declensions and verbs that can be left out might have moderate to high levels of shlang, presuming the writing system is (or in the case of Japanese, can be) phonetic rather than symbolic.

Nevertheless, the mental model of discovery or sculpture rather than production ex nihilo offers, to me, a much more realistic sense of what it is we’re actually doing when we engage in any kind of creative writing: playing within preexisting mental and linguistic frameworks, even as we push to “make it new.” That wondrous feeling of rightness you get when you’re in the zone and hit upon some new-to-you formulation: if it feels as if it comes from outside you, that’s because it does, however thoroughly you’ve internalized the rhythms and patterns of the language, so that they seem as natural as your breathing and the normally unheard beat of your pulse.

And then there’s the way we read when we’re in writing mode, with full attention and the temporary submersion of the ego to the flow of words. I’m trying to make that my baseline for all the poetry reading I do. It’s actually not terribly difficult, compared to the effort of attentively reading a more workmanlike block of prose with an eye out for shlang. As usual, St. Emily said it best:

I dwell in Possibility –
A fairer House than Prose –
More numerous of Windows –
Superior – for Doors –