“Latitudes”
Wednesday, 12 May 2021
“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.