Compression Expression

The glue in the perfect binding of my copy of James Schuyler The Morning of the Poem (1980) has dried up and the cover (with its lovely drawing by Anne Dunn) has become detached. I am waiting for the sections to fall further apart. Meanwhile I went to the bookshelf and retrieved a copy of the Selected Poems (1988) which contains some but not all the poems from 1980 as in the nature of the selected.

I found in that copy of the selected pulled lately from the bookshelf an index card with a compression of "Salute" from Freely Espousing (1969).

Past is past || one
remembers one meant
to do never did

This compacted set is from

Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough?

It seems that the compression answers the question by not enough.

If you would like to practice erasures and see some 4,000 plus results, Wave Books offers source texts and a handy interface http://erasures.wavepoetry.com/poems.php where you can toggle between erasures and source text. Worth noting the results retain spacing — the erasure reads as white space unlike the compressions.

And so for day 1499
20.01.2011