What was your journey into poetry?
I never really wrote poetry when I was young. I thought, ‘you have to be a genius to write poetry, why would I try that?’ As an adult, I moved to Germany, got married and had children. It was when I was feeling very homesick and going through a hard time that I started to write poetry and I thought, ‘why did I wait so long to do this?’

How did you discover Found poetry?
I didn’t write erasure poems until 10 years ago, when I took part in one of Jenni B. Baker’s found poetry challenges. When that project was over I didn’t pursue found poetry further. In 2016, for another challenge, I was assigned the Stephen King book, Misery. For this project I began using collage. I started to publish the work online and that’s when an editor found it and eventually asked me if I’d be interested in submitting a manuscript. I needed about 60 erasure poems for the book, but I ended up writing a lot more.


How do you choose the texts you work with? What attracts you to them? 
I try to avoid new books. I don’t want to start erasing text in a book that’s just been published. There are some practical things I always consider - is the text too small, is the page too packed? I can find book titles very evocative and that might influence me to choose a book. For example, I’ve been working on a Dutch novella called ‘Sleepless Nights’. For the poems themselves, I’m looking for great verbs and nouns. I found Misery very rich, but I’ve been asking myself what it is about Stephen King’s prose that offers all of these found poetry opportunities. It has something to do with concreteness. I like to work with texts that are detailed in their descriptions of places and objects: I avoid anything too abstract.

What methods do you use to make erasure poetry?

Typically, I use collage. I always lay out the parts on the page to check they work together, then I glue them down. I like the neatness of using paper to obscure text. I also do collage without words, but I find it hard to keep away from words for long. Of course, I write free verse poems outside of my erasure poetry. In terms of different methods, I do like stitching. I like things that are tactile, I find it inviting. There are challenges with this, though – it’s time consuming, it’s tiring for your eyes and it’s hard to work with stitching in erasure if you’re working with small words. You have to be careful with paint too. Paint is very strong, it can overwhelm your text.

 

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Do you always plan your erasure poetry?
Yes, I always read the book or page I am working with beforehand, with few exceptions. Generally, it’s good to plan because mistakes can happen. I’ve ruined many things. I might obscure a word I wanted to use - you can’t undo that. For Hotel Almighty, for example, I had five copies of Misery to work from.

Do you think found poetry is appreciated in the same way as other poetry?
I think people consider found poetry a non-serious thing. Some people frown upon it and think it looks silly - some think perhaps of pages with a sharpie marker through them. People think you’re using less imagination with erasure poetry but I don’t necessarily agree. I think of it as a form with constrictions. With Misery, I was really trying to escape the book, even though I knew the story and the text. A lot of reviews have noted how the themes of confinement and isolation come through. But I don’t like to think of it as a re-writing or reinterpretation of a text. For me, this kind of poetry is a little bit like a puzzle. It really requires you to turn off a lot of your thinking and be open to the possibilities on the page.

What would you like to have more time for?
I do wish I had more time to do collage - it’s a very slow process. I wish I had time to learn new things, to take a poetry class or painting class, as I’ve no formal training in these things.
 

Do you have a favourite word and colour?

It changes. I like words that have a kind of length to them, either long vowels, or voiced consonants. I really love the word ‘language’. And my favourite colour? Today it’s green. I love everything that green represents. I also love blue. I don’t like purple, I don’t know why.
 
What are you working on now?
I’m not committed to any particular project at the moment. I’ve started looking for poems in a new book and I’m really trying to occasionally do something without words. There’s so much inspiration on Instagram. This weekend, I’ve been painting. It feels like an endless experiment when I paint – I find things out as I try them.