The erasure poem (aka blackout poem) in this post is part and parcel of the nature of time that I’ve been meditating on all year. It’s a small piece of a big puzzle that I’m still piecing together as I grapple with Rosslyn past, present, and future.
![Icehouse, October 13, 2006 (Photo: Geo Davis)](https://i0.wp.com/www.rosslynredux.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/30f96d37-7f18-4e71-bd91-0e7fdfcee251-1.jpg?resize=600%2C400&ssl=1)
I owe everything — the ingredients, the recipe, and the final confection — to four artists: Deborah Dancy, Ray DiCapua, Janet L. Pritchard, and Judith Thorpe. The photographs in their collaborative exhibition, Like a Whisper (Like-a-Whisper.com), and their project statement, “Like a Whisper: Time on the Land”, continue to resonate so profoundly in me that I’ve taken a creative liberty (and it’s a biggie, so I hope they’ll forgive me!).
I printed their essay and — employing the crude art of erasure poetry — I distilled fragments that defy erasure. Then I shuffled and re-shuffled the most enduring words and phrases, allowing them to coalesce a new, puzzle-piecing a mosaic of words and ideas.
![Icehouse, October 13, 2006 (Photo: Geo Davis)](https://i0.wp.com/www.rosslynredux.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/img_7989-1.jpg?resize=600%2C600&ssl=1)
In short, everything in this post is owed to the following four artists and the alchemy of their collaboration.
- Deborah Dancy: deborahdancy.com
- Ray Dicapua: raydicapua.com
- Janet Pritchard: janetpritchard.com
- Judith Thorpe: judiththorpe.com
If you linked through to read their essay, you’ll have noticed that they open with a quotation from Margaret Drabble. I excerpt the first half of that quotation here.
![Carriage Barn Repairs, October 13, 2006 (Photo: Geo Davis)](https://i0.wp.com/www.rosslynredux.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/img_7988-1.jpg?resize=600%2C600&ssl=1)
The past lives on in art and memory, but it is not static: it shifts and changes as the present throws its shadow backwards.
— Margaret Drabble, A Writer’s Britain: Landscape in Literature
Without further ado, here’s me erasure poem.
![Balcony Demo, October 13, 2022 (Photo: Geo Davis)](https://i0.wp.com/www.rosslynredux.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/img_7991-1.jpg?resize=600%2C600&ssl=1)
The Nature of Time
for Deborah Dancy, Ray DiCapua, Janet L. Pritchard, and Judith Thorpe
Traces of human activity
whisper years
of scarring and healing,
erasures and scrapings
layered in a palimpsest.
Grounded in a landscape,
familiar yet foreign,
one musician offers a phrase
and another responds,
a jazz riff exploration
of shared discovery.
Simultaneous perception
of human life,
of human artifacts,
abundant evidence
of such deep history,
past, present and future.
Time is a slippery construct.
It seems to dance
both quickly and slowly
in the blink of the eye,
everywhere present,
fragmented stories,
history bumped up
against present realities,
construction and
de-construction,
a landscape of ruins,
remains of formal structures.
We believe
that remnants coalesce,
that excavation, observation,
collaborative accumulation,
and artistic practice
allow one to
wonder-dream
into ancient / modern
mysteries about
the nature of
time.
![Balcony Demo, October 13, 2022 (Photo: Geo Davis)](https://i0.wp.com/www.rosslynredux.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/img_7992-1.jpg?resize=600%2C600&ssl=1)
The photos in this post are drawn from our earliest days and more recent times. For that is the timeless nature of Rosslyn.
![Tony Paving, October 13, 2022 (Photo: R.P. Murphy)](https://i0.wp.com/www.rosslynredux.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/img_7994-1.jpg?resize=600%2C600&ssl=1)
What do you think?