Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise by Marc Chagall
Created June 3, 2010 by Nicole Nicholson. Original text used: “Pointed Roofs” by Dorothy Miller Richardson.
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This poem was created (I don’t say written, and you’ll find out why in a minute) for We Write Poems Prompt #5: Erasures, which comes to us courtesy of Angie Werren.
She directed us to go to the Erasures website over at Wave Books, take the same source text — “Pointed Roofs” by Dorothy Miller Richardson — and erase words at random: as many, or as few, as we liked.
I ended up erasing a good percentage of the words, and this is originally what I had after I was done. And I cheated a little: I added a pronoun, a conjunction, and a preposition to make the text make a bit more sense. Then, I played with spacing and line breaks.
It was a great deal of fun breaking out of my normal style and creation methods…just fun to play around and let a story emerge from the words. I hope you enjoyed this piece.
-Nicole
P.S. Totally unrelated, but my “Houdini” poem was featured in Thinkering, an online comic strip. Go here to check it out: http://reudor.wordpress.com/2010/06/09/escape-artist/
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Raven's Wing Poetry 
Hi Nicole,
Clever to make a theme from Eve’s name and weave it into this with only few alterations. I love “thought of the first time, a duet with Eve”. I relegated her to simply the short form of “evening”!
Your ending is similar to mine…but your piece makes more sense. It’s beautiful. I keep rereading it. I love
“a duet with Eve
playing a running melody
her part a page of swollen…”
Well erased!
So much passion in this. You really distilled the emotion out of the original piece to write an intense and brand new story. Well crafted.
oh, I love how you took the erasure and transported it into mythology. just beautiful. amazing how a little pronoun can change the whole story behind a piece. amazing.
I’m so happy you like erasing! hope to see more of it from you!!
😀
and congrats on the Houdini poem — I retweeted your tweet @wewritepoems!
Now that’s a good idea. Adam.
No wonder my Eve was so irritating–she missed her myth-ter. Seriously, I do like your take on it. And the Chagal is amazing.
I like your take with Eve, especially “Eve had / nothing / but / touch”. The way you’ve spaced the words gives it power.
This is my second “wow, just wow,” tonight. Love the artwork, love how you laid out the poem, loved the connection to myth, loved the swollen-ness, trembling limbs and burning eyes, love it, love it Nicole.
I behold your found poem of the duet of Eve and Adam. I see the shape of the thing and I delight in seeing. I think we’re searching for the duet and the music (including passion).
Love your found poem Nicole!
Well done!
Pamela
I love this.