“Nature, Chrome Painted”

“Nature, Chrome Painted” by Sarah Ann Winn is an erasure of a page from The Land of Little Rain by Mary Hunter Austin.

About the poem and process of creating it, Sarah says:

“I love the way erasures can bring your own experiences and outlook from a piece which seems as solid as a block of stone before you begin carving. In grad school, I took a class called ‘Creative Processes’ where we examined commonly held perceptions about making a piece of art and being an artist. We experimented with ways around/through perceptions which didn’t serve the art itself: the idea of the lone artist, the idea of a finite number of ideas, the idea of creative block. One of the experiments showed us how even snapping photos could open up new paths in writing. By looking at a set, it was easy to see why a certain photo would stand out as having a ‘mood.’ I didn’t have any idea when I started erasing this source text, a public domain book found on Wave Books’ website, that a poem about loss would emerge.”