All right.
We're going to keep going with poetry and chat
about the process.
So I think we have Nicole, if you'd like to share,
and then we'll do another round.
Thank you.
Thank you, John.
You know I love that poem.
I'm the Nikki Black from Apopka Way.
I knew it.
I was like-- I don't know.
I'm like, OK if I infer this--
I was like, seems like it.
It's me.
I want to go back to what Hanif was saying earlier
about the process of erasure, and wanting
to revise a document that felt like it was wanting revision.
And I think I feel and felt similarly
in revising the Ferguson Report, in that I
wanted to revise a present tense that felt just hard to be in.
And so wanting to revise a present and a past,
outcomes that have all too often been the death of many of us,
I set out to erase this with hopefully--
I'm not done yet-- hopefully, an ending
that is a revision to all the endings we've
seen in these types of reports.
And so hopefully, life will be at the end
of this instead of death.
So I'm going to end with a short excerpt from The Ferguson
Report: An Erasure, and this is pages 5 to 8.
"Officials Found Our Conduct Caused Official Harm."
"Officials found us at home in the high grass
of relative safety, under a God elected by men.
We are in contempt, he said.
We have violated the violations, he said, at which point
we began to set in concert with the sun."
Thank you.
Thank you, Nicole.
It's beautiful work.
Redaction, or erasures-- people are calling them different
things, found poems--
I think it's challenging.
It's challenging to do them, to create a new meaning
from something that is already said.
And then the other thing is, I also
think the layer of writing on behalf
of some very bad things that are occurring,
that's another tension.
And where do you take that to?
And do you tease out what is actually
there in those documents, or do you try and circumvent
the documents?
And Hanif mentioned this, and I think
everyone has mentioned the word resistance.
And I think that that's what happens a lot in the found
poems and the redactions.
There's just so much resistance there.
And I just think that you did a beautiful work with that.
So I just wanted to share that.
Thank you so much, Diana.
Thank you
Gorgeous work.
Thank you.