We Are Not Where We Are
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Preview
Creation Date
6-10-2025
Publisher
Bull City Press
Document Type
Book
Description
Since its publication in 1854, Henry David Thoreau’s Walden has ensnared the American imagination. In We Are Not Where We Are, poets Matt Donovan and Jenny George perform a chapter-by-chapter erasure of Walden, challenging its deeply flawed beliefs about individualism, the natural world, and relationships between people and the land. The resultant poems embody Donovan and George’s collaborative spirit, unearthing in Thoreau’s text a pluralistic vision of limitless possibility and wild beauty.
From the authors:
“I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from any neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond,” Thoreau writes in the opening of Walden, a book that is undeniably central to the American literary canon, as well as deeply flawed in its beliefs about individualism, the natural world, and forms of relation between people. If Thoreau’s engagement with nature and experiment in solitude might afford opportunities for self-reflection about our current ecological disasters and technological addictions, for example, it’s also well-worth interrogating his relentlessly patriarchal language, assumptions around land and belonging, and habitual surges of racism. As an act of collaborative intervention, We Are Not Where We Are was inspired both by the ways in which Walden continues to ensnare the American imagination, as well as its inherently problematic nature as a text.
Our rules for creating these erasures were simple. The central chapters of Walden were divided equally between us and follow the order of the original text. All removed words and passages are indicated by a uniform length of blank space, and we didn’t change any of Thoreau’s original language or the order of his words on the page. Rather than create a blackout poem from the book’s long introductory chapter “Economy,” we instead appropriated passages from that section for the titles of our pieces. “Conclusion,” the book’s final chapter, was created together as a collaborative blackout poem at Jenny’s kitchen table.
