Poetic Conversations column is so pleased and lucky to share new blackout poetry by writer-poet, scholar, teacher, force of art-nature ~ Becca Klaver. I saw Becca’s blackouts as she uploaded them to Facebook, and I asked if we could rebroadcast them. It is our honor to publish Becca’s work alongside an artist statement for this subversive, delightful project — truly a Poetic Conversation with the source text, illustrations, and beyond.
Becca Klaver: While unpacking last summer, I pulled my copy of The Snow Queen (adapted by Naomi Lewis, illustrated by Errol Le Cain, and published by The Viking Press in 1979) out of a box of books from childhood. I had no plans for it; I just wanted to look at that big beautiful book again. It sat around for months, and then in January, I found myself stuck at home in a polar vortex. One week, Iowa City was pummeled by two-and-a-half feet of snow across three storms; after that, temperatures stayed below zero for another week, dropping as low as -22° one night. In the midst of the extreme cold, I noticed The Snow Queen leaning against my bookcase. I wasn’t going anywhere in the real world, so I decided to go on a journey to the Snow Queen’s palace.
I started taking photos of the book’s pages and blacking them out with a stylus on my iPad. I reread the book page by page, one per day, with no predetermined arc in mind. (Even with an erasure project, I guess I’m still a “pantser.”) Sometimes I carved out poems (repeated phrases and uncanny imagery seemed to ask for this treatment); sometimes I told faster versions of the same tale (I often find myself wishing stories would use fewer words); sometimes I coaxed out the subtexts that sat right there on the surface (like the little girl’s relationship with the robber girl); sometimes I tried to subvert, toy with, or cover up something I found unsavory in the source text (racism, classism, some Christian army stuff). I blacked out all character names except the Snow Queen’s, and I let the pronouns get jumbled up a bit. Along the way, I became aware of writing a tale that is one of my stories, too, about going out and looking for someone who is lost. It felt comforting to return to my own story through a circuitous fairy path, to be accompanied while wandering out into the cold, wide world.
At the end of the book, Kay and Gerda arrive back home, and it’s summertime. It was also a freakish 74° at the end of February in Iowa as I finished the project. Sitting in the breeze of an open window, I tweaked the ending slightly: the “cold empty splendour of the Snow Queen’s palace” is no longer a “bad dream” but a “glorious” one, as January now feels to me here at the end of February, Leap Day 2024.
Becca Klaver is a writer, teacher, editor, scholar, and literary collaboration conjurer. She is the author of the poetry collections LA Liminal (Kore Press), Empire Wasted (Bloof Books), and Ready for the World (Black Lawrence Press), as well as several chapbooks. Her most recent publications include Midwinter Constellation (Black Lawrence), a book co-written with 31 other poets in homage to Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, and Greetings from Bowling Green (The Magnificent Field), a chapbook of postcard poems. As an editor, she co-founded Switchback Books, is currently co-editing, with Arielle Greenberg, the anthology Electric Gurlesque (Saturnalia Books), and has created pop-up projects such as Women Poets Wearing Sweatpants. She lives in Iowa City, where she works as Program Manager of the Iowa Summer Writing Festival.
Poetic Conversations: ‘The Snow Queen’ Blackout Poetry by Becca Klaver was originally published in ANMLY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.