The following is a poem by Nik De Dominic made via a process of erasure on the text named in the title. It is published here for the first time. Nik provided this statement on the project:
“I xeroxed pages out of a book my mother had sent me that had a pretty cover, yellow and green. I’d had it for years and had never looked at it. I hadn’t written for awhile and thought I would try my hand at an exercise I often work through with students, manipulating a found text, to generate, to get me out of my own head and tics and language and habits and techniques and the things that were probably causing the block in the first place, the me. I eliminated phrases, redacting away with a black chisel tip marks-a-lot . I felt like a spy. Or rather a person who redacts things for spies. It felt good. When I was finished I sent it to my friend Andrew Wessels and told him I’d made an erasure. I wanted his approval. Andrew is much smarter than I am. When he read it, he wrote back, “This isn’t an erasure.” I could imagine him shaking his head and judging me. I asked why not. He said, “erasures (that at least seem to work best to me) are works that find an otherness in the text, an unintended result of the problems of circumscription in the derridean and/or de manian meaning of that. difference/difference/etc. i think reddy (either written somewhere or just in conversation) has mentioned it as a ghostly voice within the text..you are finding your own story/poem there. the original text as generative for your own purposes. this poem feels like a nik de dominic poem/story.” I said, but Andrew, but I erased shit.”
From Henry Sturgis’ Essay “The Iron Spine” from Old Adventures of the West
the raw afternoon
dedicated
both oceans
Before
a bystander
shouted
hush
the hissing
at the junction point
the
“Dot, dot, dot.”
aswarm from headlight to cab
discreet
now truly – physical –
driven home.)
wrangling
each other’s pockets
and laying under
them foolish. Nevertheless,
drawn
aside
and lumbering along
Good Hope.
glowing
in the lush
urge
:a wagon halts
the well-connected
parched
right-of-way
Iron one fate would scorn
The job called for
Judah.
recalled years
later
,
I’m going to have to do it.
probed deeper
the magic
tried to convince those who would listen
as harmless if tire-
some
now preoccupied
he handed in
the mountains
an old
wagon
and the Nevada flats beyond. That was it—
for tunnel hogs and blasting crews.
Judah charged back to his headquarters at
the drugstore.
Judah went chumming
for bigger fish.
a number of fruitless meeting
among them were
a manipulator, a money raiser
a railroad to the Missouri.
Judah told his wife
“It’s about time
in the construction of this road.”
a distinct asset:
the most wild-eyed
elephant. we can harness up.
What Judah did not know was
arm twisting
Judah was
alluvial soil
The cronies were an eye
later estimated
a number
Judah boarded a steamer for the East,
he died.
the widow. got on with heir business
a
prime mover.
, (seated, third from left) .
schemes afoot. For Instance,
hard-handed
men in the field.
You are about to build a country that has
neither law nor order.
he was ordered to
pacify some of the more troublesome
troops of horses.
“Nobody knows where he is but everybody
knows where he has been.”
The
railroads could issue
the Missouri River
The Lord so constructed
fit to belong
to the profession.” There were, however, two major hazards: distance and Indians.
“Away she goes!” Then, the
rail boomed
the spikers and clamp-
ers carried iron rods,
steel bars, cable, rope, switchstands,
A reporter from
the Deseret
the flatcars;
Some work in the High
So efficient
one mile of
frantic race
to their
considerable joy
gamblers, peddlers, and prostitutes, all eager
progress,
the pleasure-mon-
gers
“Watchfires gleam
sea-like
“while inside soliders
are
a fellow creature
Sierras. the terrible everyone.
in daylight unwhipped
In daylight gliding through
slung to waist.”
passing out
riffles his toughest ironmen, walked slowly
through town one summer night.
there in the graveyard
Several small advance parties of
the
trapped in the flaming
Occasionally
an iron horse alive
in-
fused with magic
a
medicine rope swept under
the wheels
with
little or no damage
the work of road the work of
making
the ink
The fact
of
the good
The securities
The kited profits
The referee
changes my line I’ll quit the road
the road
We all want to say with the road.
there was
the line
no trouble at all –
passes to ride and
hitchhike
the assault
modestly
Roaring cease-
lessly, bragging, bullying
the
summit passes
Flat on his back
shouting profane
of
scheme, and the remaining
(standing under bird cage) settled the quarrel between
evening s
water, boiled
sheer rock miles from the
wove baskets of reeds
while the nitro blew.
steam
burrowed
through
the fall
hitched to
the
death in canyon bottoms:
The ordeal was over.
the boys spurred ahead.
When they came rivers or ravines,
Snow and even river ice
laid rail so narrow
in the water
to carve parallel within sight of each other.
that
of the nonsense
on a junction point
from sunup to sundown for
ten miles and two hundred feet.
it began to rain
the mud to champagne
The track hands
drunk ramshackle
rails met
What was it the engines said,
this was one hell of a way to
build a railroad.
THERMOS 