I have been admiring my friend Allisonn Church’s stunning visual poetry/erasure pieces for the last few years, and I am so grateful they have shared an artist statement to accompany this sparkling selection. Poetic Conversations is very lucky to feature her inspiring hybrid poetry art and words.
Allisonn Church: My first attempt at erasure (“I still think about…”) was pulled from an old issue of Orion magazine; I can’t remember which issue or story it was. Erasure offers a new way to consider and manipulate the words in a text, and I was interested in exploring that. Probably the most profound and compelling example of this is Nicole Sealey’s full erasure book, The Ferguson Report.
I am fortunate to live in what’s known as “the five college area,” and that puts me in close proximity to the Boutelle-Day Poetry Center at Smith College, where they’ve hosted a Blackout Poetry Project since 2022. Participants create pieces of art and poetry from sample texts, and the center typically shares these on social media. They are so amazing. I’m obsessed with the effective hybridization of visual art and writing. These pieces have played a role in inspiring me to add more to the blank/black spaces in erasure works.
A few years ago, my grandmother subscribed me to a publication called Mornings with Jesus, which felt like good source material for blackout work. That’s where I got “I was intended for joy…”
The rest (in this collection) come from a copy of Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson that my high school English teacher gave me to read, which I never did. He seemed to suspect I’d gone through a specific traumatic experience, and that it would resonate for me. Really I was probably struggling with undiagnosed depression and anxiety. That English teacher also introduced me to William Carlos Williams, Seamus Heaney, William Butler Yeats, Phyllis Wheatly, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and others whose work I actually did read. Those were more right for me.
Today I am a part-time poet living in Massachusetts. I majored in both English & American Literature and Russian Language & Literature at Brandeis, where my main focus across majors was often poetry. On the English side, I took every course on Romantic poetry that the university offered; on the Russian side, I focused my senior thesis on the work of Vladimir Mayakovsky. I am currently enrolled in Pocket MFA. Information about current publications and my social media tag can be found on my website, www.wildchurchpoems.com.
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Poetic Conversations: Visual Poetry by Guest Artist Allisonn Church was originally published in ANMLY on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.