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I love the language in John McPhee’s “Season of the Chalk” from The New Yorker. McPhee’s language is so rich and dense. Lots to mine there, I thought. But the material was exceedingly uncooperative. I wrote two or three erasure poem drafts, none of which had any energy.

The material wouldn’t yield to an erasure poem, but consented to slip into something akin to a cento: this messy animation of minerals and water.

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