“hold the world”

“hold the world” by Deborah-Zenha Adams was created from The House of the Vampire by George Sylvester Viereck (1907). Please click here to read.

About the poem and the process of composing it, Deborah-Zenha Adams writes:

My process for erasure poems is not particularly interesting, and probably not particularly original. I begin by selecting a few pages from any piece of text. I scan them for strong nouns and verbs, and I also look for compound words or words-within-words that might yield an unexpected turn to the poem. There is usually one word or phrase that becomes the core of the work; once I find that, the poem reveals itself. Texts from the 19th and early 20th centuries often contain a wide selection of both hard and flowery words, and these can be combined to make a high-tension poem. In this case, the words “secret,” “charm,” and “music” almost begged to be combined with the word “world.”