Notes on Race
For thirty years Pamela Hobart Carter taught science, preschool, and a few other things. Now she teaches on the side, and writes poems, plays, fiction, and non-fiction. Her plays have been read or produced in Seattle (her home), Montreal (her childhood home) and Fort Worth (where she has only visited).
Erasure poetry is a type of found poetry in which the poet takes an existing source text and creates their own poem by erasing, redacting, or otherwise obscuring the words in the original text.
By Pamela Carter
an erasure from How to Keep Bees (1905) by Anna Botsford Comstock, all language in the order of the original text, including the title
To an extent the consensus opinion to-day
is that races in America point
into earliest experiences.
Through them we first learned love
and habit, domain and pleasure, folk—
under ordinary circumstances—
sweet-tempered and believing we mean well.
Some can be saved by nectar.
A solid hive.
A mother of a kind disposition.
Race heated over a lamp, melting,
pressing fast.
Afterward, a great spirit, hot enough
to properly hold breath,
is a useful device. Like a valve
permitting free escape.
Like being filled with desire
to try experiments
in preventing any colonies.