Despite making erasure poems from the Diary of Samuel Pepys for more than a decade, I’ve always worked digitally and never actually owned or indeed opened a volume of the 1899 Wheatley edition, whose text I’ve been taking such liberties with… until now. Last night when I went to the monthly meeting of our local Audubon chapter for a presentation on orchids, a member who had attended my own presentation back in November, in which I’d mentioned my erasure project, gifted me the entire set! I was momentarily speechless. She said she’d been a book collector for many years but was now in de-acquisition mode and finding homes for all her treasures.
I’m beyond grateful. From a haiku perspective, there’s so much wabi-sabi in old books like these. For one thing, they seem never to have had a single reader in their more than century of existence: the pages in most volumes, though yellowing, remain uncut. (And no, I’m not going to mutilate them to make analogue erasures. My dad was a librarian. He’d come back to haunt me! I’ll use photocopies if it comes to that.)
I record this here as a reminder to myself never to say no to local gigs, no matter how much they might cost me in nights of lost sleep. As Qoheleth says: Cast thy bread upon the waters.
Another year of Pepys erasures, done and dusted. And before New Year’s for once! And as I’ve done every year since 2017, I’ve compiled the erasures into a PDF, free for download, samizdat-style circulation, and remixing. Here’s the link. (And if you’ve missed any of the others, you can find all the download links in the last sentence of the top-of-page description of the Pepys Diary Erasure Project.)
Painting of Samuel Pepys by John Hayls
Looking again at this painting of Pepys, I’m reminded how much older than him I am this time around: three decades, instead of just the two I had on him last time. But it’s hard to tell how much that might’ve influenced the inevitable change in my perspective on Mr. Pepys, as I’ve gotten to know him over the course of this ten-year-long ‘deep misreading.’ In general, though, my wonderment at people in my own life who resemble Pepys in their energy and ambition has only grown with age, as the erasure project has assumed an increasingly significant role in my otherwise shambolic existence, now that I’ve reached a level of mastery I could barely conceive of ten years ago, when I was still just entranced by the process of erasure and posting any old garbage in my typically impulsive manner. But in defense of my 47-year-old self, Pepys was just a side project at the time, something to be fitted in around other, more exciting projects… which I’ve half-forgotten and can’t even be arsed to look up right now.
I remain deeply grateful to my then-partner Rachel for getting me started on the whole thing, so we’d have an excuse to read it together. Those were great times. But reading my 2013 erasures every morning this year was painful, I’m not going to lie—so many wince-worthy lines! Fortunately, Luisa Igloria and I had plenty of other content, so readers didn’t abandon Via Negativa in droves. I don’t expect I ever would’ve had the nerve to start blogging like that if Luisa hadn’t already joined.
Look at me reminiscing like some kind of geezer! LOL.
I dimly recall that it was partway through the summer of 2014 that something clicked and finally figured out where I was going with Pepys, so I’m excited to see what happens with the project this year: will I be able to coast a little at some point, and just polish previous drafts? There have only been about a half-dozen times when I’ve been able to do that so far. Regardless, I hope to keep going in this till I have PDFs for all ten years of the diary. But I have to tell you, I am already champing at the bit to get started on my next erasure project, and if you know me, you can probably guess what book I have in mind. Superstition prevents me from saying anything further.
Anyway, enjoy the PDF, and do consider sharing it with anyone who might enjoy it. Happy New Year.
I started the year with a new, more woods-worthy laptop. My five-year-old Acer had begun to fail, which was hugely disappointing but I used the opportunity to get something a bit more portable. Over the past year I’ve done more and more writing in the woods, but generally on my phone (bought last year at this time), which works fine for poems and free-form zuihitsu-type essays of the sort I blogged last April, but not so well for, say, erasure poems, where one does need to be able to see a wider screen. I’m also not one to watch and share videos from a phone, and the finer details of administering a website are vastly easier on a larger-screened device. It would be nice, I thought, in warmer weather to be able to bring along a wifi hotspot and do all my web work at stopping points on my daily walks (benches, stones piled against trees, that sort of thing). I’m not keen on touch-screens, so rather than a tablet I got a notebook-style computer with a 13-inch screen weighing less than two pounds.
Staying light isn’t only a concern for backpackers. Freely wandering in a literal sense tends to free up the mind as well, and first and foremost, I think, it has to be fun. When I am in the zone, noticing things, snapping photos and jotting down ideas, it helps that I’m not sweating profusely and gasping for breath. So the ultralight shoes I wear, for example, make walking an altogether more enjoyable experience, a fact that was brought home to me two months ago when I bought a heavy pair of work boots and took them for a walk to break them in. Going up any kind of hill became an unexpected chore, and I ended up not enjoying the hike nearly as much as I usually do, even though this is exactly the sort of footwear I used to live in, back when I didn’t spend at least four hours outdoors every day.
Since I always forget to post here, you don’t have to scroll very far to find a post from last March which ended up seeming a bit prophetic about all the “walking poems” I ended up writing in the ensuing months.
come to think of it my feet were born first
i had gone to extreme lengths not to leave home
but is that why i think best on my feet
What is a walking poem? More than just a poem based on a hike, it aims
To engage readers the way walking engages the heart, lungs, and mind. In-breath, out-breath. Gathering impressions, gathering wool.
Or so I wrote at Via Negativa last October. Click through for more.
Pepys Erasure Project
In other big news which I am late in sharing, I made it to the end of Pepys’ Diary on May 30, having used every entry in at least one erasure, compiled a PDF of the final year (see here for download links to all the PDFs), then took the next seven months off to write the aforementioned walking poems. On January 1 I rejoined the folks reading Pepys together online, though possibly just for a couple of years. I feel I owe it to the project to come up with better erasures for the first 500 or so diary entries, before I really knew what I was doing.
That is of course all going on over at Via Negativa. If you’d like to follow along, pick up a free subscription via the form in the sidebar there.
Poetry Month approaches!
One final note: My previously announced reading at the Frenchtown Bookshop in New Jersey, hosted by Vasiliki Katsarou, has been re-scheduled for April Fools Day, which suits me to a T. Here’s the announcement.
my walking companion a couple of weeks ago in the Seven Mountains (northeast of here)
Navigating blog archives can be tiresome, so for the past four years I’ve been compiling my daily erasures from the Diary of Samuel Pepys into documents which I then convert into PDFs at the end of the year. Yesterday I released the latest one, for 1667. Links to all four free ebooks may be found at the top of the Pepys Diary Erasure Project page at Via Negativa, as well as the project’s page here.
As I mentioned in the announcement post at VN, alert downloaders will notice from the URLs that I have ambitiously designated these compendiums as Vol. 5, Vol. 6, etc., which raises the question whether there will ever be Vols. 1-4. I guess it depends on how burnt out I feel when the diary comes to an end a year and a half from now (or slightly longer, given that I am now nearly a month behind). For the first three and half years of this project, my erasures generally sucked — that’s over a thousand erasure poems that will need to be revised or replaced. (I’m not saying they’re always brilliant now, only that I have a somewhat better idea of what I’m trying to do.)
This feels like one of those essays that school teachers used to require on the first day back: What Did I Do On Summer Vacation? Because I’ve been on vacation from this blog since last spring, it seems. Damn.
Well, mainly I moped, like everyone else in this goddamned covidious shitstorm. But I did make a lot of videopoems, as well as continue to plug along with (almost) daily erasure poems. So today I was all set to create a new page for the Videopoetry section of the website on my just-concluded (I think) video haibun collection Pandemic Season, only to find that I’d already done so back in July. Oops. Since it embeds the whole Vimeo showcase for the collection, which is 24 videopoems long, that will do for now. Currently I’m giving it a rest so I can go back and look at it with fresh eyes in a couple of months, and decide whether I want to mess with any of the films, make a book out of them, or just let it be. For now, the series archive at Via Negativa is probably a better way to engage with the collection, since there’s a transcript of each as well as extensive process notes.
I didn’t get to be a complete slacker today, though. Seven years after starting the Pepys Diary erasure project at VN, it finally occurred to me that maybe that deserved its own page here. Among other things, it gave me an excuse to highlight a few videopoems made with texts from the project. Check it out.
(I initially created a project page, experimenting with a custom content type designed for use in a portfolio-style site, because I still tell myself that one day I’m going to re-design this website to foreground a portfolio of projects, rather than continuing to pigeon-hole work by medium, print vs. video. But that seems unlikely to happen any time soon. Bizarrely, though, the project page auto-posted to Twitter, while the page-page did not. All of which is way more geekiness than either reader of this blog probably cares about. Sorry.)
As regular readers of Via Negativa know, I’ve been making erasure poems from the online Diary of Samuel Pepys since January 1, 2013, and though I’m currently almost a week behind, I’ve yet to miss an entry. (What’s an erasure poem? Think of it as a poem sculpted from, or discovered within, someone else’s text: one can only use words or parts of words as they appear in the original, and in the order they appear there.)
Pepys himself rarely missed a day in his diary, so in six years this project has generated rather a lot of poetry. Granted, it hasn’t all been brilliant, and I do it as much for the process as for the product. Has it made me a better poet? I believe it has. It’s certainly taught me humility and persistence, and I think I’ve become a more nimble writer of micropoetry as well. But I’ve never regarded the project as a way to generate traditionally publishable work. So starting in 2017, I got the idea of compiling my daily erasures into a single document, which I could then convert into a PDF and release at the end of the year for anyone in search of something a little different to read. So here are the download links:
After the conclusion of the nine-and-a-half-year diary, I hope to go back and compile the first four years into PDFs as well — if I’m not completely burnt out by then.
When I started blogging erasure poems based on the Diary of Samuel Pepys on January 1, 2013, it was with the understanding that I would only do the interesting entries, and stop as soon as it got boring. Two years in and I have yet to skip a single entry of the diary—not even the one-sentence ones. It’s become this weird compulsion. Maybe it’s a crutch, a way to avoid having to think up poems on my own? Nah. It’s actually quite a bit more time-consuming. But it’s teaching me a lot about invention and discovery, the observer effect, and the shadow text—which, like a shadow government, thrives on its own irrelevance. Within a few months of beginning the project, I switched to a fully digital style of erasure using HTML. And in the latter half of 2014, I began to use erasure to teach myself how to compose better haiku — one of the most difficult kinds of poetry to get right.
What better way to celebrate two years of erasing Pepys than with a videopoem by one of the best in the poetry-film business? My friend Marc Neys, aka Swoon, surprised me with this in late December:
But even now, I’m sure I can stop erasing Pepys anytime I want. I just don’t want to yet.
