“Latitudes”

“Latitudes” by Pamela Hobart Carter was created from Anna Botsford Comstock’s How to Keep Bees (1905). Please click here to read.

About the poem and the process of composing it, Pamela writes:

I love erasures. Often I make them as I read a book in my lap, handwriting words I extract, but this I erased on my computer by copying the passage into a file and deleting words as I read along, always keeping language in the order of the original text, except for the title, which is plucked from the first line of the poem. I chose line breaks, punctuation, and capitalizations of my own. I really wanted to include scantlings, such a quirky word, but had no idea what it meant and had to look it up. Sometimes I try to make a poem of very different content from what I am reading. Here I decided I wanted an abundance of honey. Honey would be central.