antARCTIC erasure
a series of found poems exploring missing voices and the voice within
Leaving Finland, and finishing Barry Lopez’s final essay collection, I started to become curious (again) about my own writing voice, as well as the missing voices of women in the polar expeditions of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
As an author, I know I will never be a Lopez or a Solnit. An Erlich or a Kimmerer. But I also know I can still be that other more entirely parochial thing: myself.
Waiting for our flight home, full of warming-thoughts and self compassion, I gazed distractedly on the final pages of Arctic Dreams and imagined my own voice within Lopez’s. His influence on my diaries. The lasting legacy of a man now gone.
I made the following erasure poem in response (and later worked it up in photoshop at home). I really like this, and feel it captures something quite strongly of me in it.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Breccia by Ruth Allen to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.