Erasure and Vonnegut

I really enjoyed reading Nets by Jen Bervin. I noticed that in several sonnets Bervin manages to write Nets that don't go against the sonnet- but stand by it and in a way bring forth the essence of what Shakespeare was trying to saying through them, and I thought that that was very interesting, and at the same time respectful to the writer and his words. 

So, I decided to attempt erasure on one of my favorite passages from Slaughter House Five by Kurt Vonnegut Jr- to try and condense the essence of the passage into a poem by using Vonnegut's words themselves.

“The letter said that they were two feet high, and green., and shaped like plumber's friends. Their suction cups were on the ground, and their shafts, which were extremely flexible, usually pointed to the sky. At the top of each shaft was a little hand with a green eye in its palm. The creatures were friendly, and they could see in four dimensions. They pitied Earthlings for being able to see only three. They had many wonderful things to teach Earthlings, especially about time. Billy promised to tell what some of those wonderful things were in his next letter.

Billy was working on his second letter when the first letter was published. The second letter started out like this:

The most important thing I learned on Tralfamadore was that when a person dies he only appears to die. He is still very much alive in the past, so it is very silly for people to cry at his funeral. All moments, past, present and future, always have existed, always will exist. The Tralfamadorians can look at all the different moments just that way we can look at a stretch of the Rocky Mountains, for instance. They can see how permanent all the moments are, and they can look at any moment that interests them. It is just an illusion we have here on Earth that one moment follows another one, like beads on a string, and that once a moment is gone it is gone forever.

--Smriti Bansal

Works Cited

Vonnegut, Kurt, Jr. Slaughter House Five. N.p.: Dial Trade, 1999. Print.