Old World

an erasure poem

[Note: the voiceover above is only a reading of the poem, not the entire post.]

---

I was reading an article on my phone the other day, and a sentence jumped out at me:

Few astronomers look to the sky anymore, or even put an eye to a telescope.

I took a screenshot of the paragraphs that held that statement, and returned to it this morning, deciding to make of those paragraphs an erasure poem.

I explain a bit about erasure poetry in this short video I made several months ago, about a different poetry project:

Here’s the screenshot I took of the two paragraphs from the original article, which is about Nobel Prizes being given out to scientists who used physics to train A.I. “neural” networks:

Another article says the discoveries of these two scientists helped “pave the way” for our current A.I. boom.

This isn’t an article about the Nobel Prize or what kind of people are deserving of it, or whether the research of these men will ultimately prove to be beneficial or harmful to humanity. (Consider the irony Alfred Nobel’s life, the pacifist who invented dynamite.)

It would take far more research, time, and thought for me to write knowledgeably about such things. Today, I only have enough mental space for a poem and not even with my own words. The convenience of found poetry.

This is my first time doing a found poem digitally. With previous projects, I used white-out or a marker to erase or black out words. In creating this piece, I used the white marker on my computer’s photo app to erase words and lines:

old world

humans
grow   more complex.

Few     look at the sky anymore, or even

Earth

                       familiar and strange;

The heavens are       a     discovery here

science

                   has           rewarded

planting flags on       continents

the world’s        climate
        and      insecurity          don’t respect              

boundaries. Rare is the         mist;

increasingly common          
                                the computation