Heading for Spring

Natalie Warther is a Senior Writer at 72andSunny and MFA candidate at Bennington College.

This little poem was made by eliminating words from a text until a new message is revealed–– a poetic form called “erasure.”

Erasure is a way of redefining a text’s purpose on the poet’s terms.

The process relies heavily on intuition; the poet trains herself to pay attention to the slight pull she feels towards certain words, and by honoring that pull, a new purpose is born.

Discovering a life’s purpose seems so much more complicated than discovering a poem’s purpose, but maybe they’re not that different. Maybe the job of both is just to honor our intuition, eliminate what we don’t need, and act when we feel the pull.