Creative Response

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For my partnership, my work was primarily conducted through e-mail. The bulk of communication is logistical and uninteresting by nature. I chose an e-mail at random from my tagged messages concerning my project and printed it out. I hoped to find some small point of interest or moment of unintended poetry within the text by isolating certain elements with black bars, in the way that sensitive documents are redacted before being made public. I wanted to find a readymade poem through an erasure technique. I selected the traditional English haiku form of a three-line mood poem, broken up into 17 syllables. I attempted to redact the document initially using a black marker but found the ink too thin to completely obscure the text, so I decided to use thick black duct tape, cut to thin strips and masked over every word and symbol save for three lines which met a (loose) haiku criteria. I don’t believe the poem “works” but I do feel that the collage aspects and redacting of this particular e-mail exchange are more interesting now than without my attempted intervention.