David Dodd Lee


David Dodd Lee's Animalities was published in 2014. Unlucky Animals, a collection that includes original poems, collages, erasures and dictionary sonnets, will appear in early 2019. He is the author of ten books of poems and his artwork has been featured in three one-person exhibitions since 2014. Recent artwork has appeared in Tupelo Quarterly, The Rumpus, and Twyckenham Notes. In 2016 he began making sculpture, most of which he installs on various public lands, surreptitiously. He lives on the St. Joseph River and teaches at Indiana University South Bend where he is Editor-in-Chief of 42 Miles Press.


“In a note that accompanies And Others, Vaguer Presences, the most recent collection of erasures by David Dodd Lee, he uses the phrase, “the poem wanting what the poem wants.” This statement curiously corroborates my impression that these poems were actually written by the poems themselves, which had definite ideas about what they wanted and didn’t want. It’s a strange feeling, being twice removed from one’s poems, strange and refreshing. I highly recommend Lee’s version of the poems’ poems.” --John Ashbery

Process:

The Ashbery erasure poems are works in which I subtract most of John Ashbery's original verbiage, resulting in a "new" poem (erasure). Though the text is composed of already existing language, each erasure reflects my own aesthetic, philosophical, and autobiographical interests. The placement of text on each page is approximate to Ashbery’s own (very loosely) in this new work, but the new syntax suggests the emergence, often, of narrative threads that were not obvious in the original work. Arguments of ownership result, of course, but the erasures are created in the spirit of the collaborative. Tension results from the inconclusiveness regarding the intent in the creation of these erasures.