Sunday, 2pm at Melbourne Street Studios, Leeds. YOU SHOULD COME. IT WILL BE FUN AND MESSY. Bring: glue sticks, scissors, old newspapers and packaging (clean not skanky!).
On Sunday 17th March at 2pm, I’ll be running a workshop at 2pm at Melbourne Street Studios (Melbourne St, Leeds – address here) as part of The Fabulous Recycling and Discourse on the Environment Exhibition (about which, more information here) working with old newspapers and packaging to create found (and concrete) poems.
The exhibition is by artists Donna Bramall and Rachel Hinds – the exhibition aims to show their “individual responses to the realities of how the waste created by society effects the environment we live in”.
Whether you’re an experienced writer or have never written a poem before, it’s a great way of working with form and enjoying words for their sound, as objects and in their arbitrary (but often intriguing and beautiful) collisions with other words. That’s the fun of found poetry of this kind: you choose the words ‘off-the-shelf’, someone has already written them down – you’re collecting, curating and creating with them. And whatever the self reveals, even through ‘randomness’, still reveals the self – the theory goes.
You can lay them out in interesting and peculiar ways, in shapes and with images – along the lines of Concrete Poetry.
Finally, as an example – here is a found-poem I made working with some students (when teaching):
A found poem, mainly from Metro headlines!
And here’s the poem typed out:
Summon The Urban Future…
…naturally adaptive,
the sirens tumble
unsupported patterns.
Now meet the Ultimate
30-month low you’ll treasure,
transforming a perfect A-Lister.
Buy the £440,000 art cakes
inside the new blue red carpet,
as accidental tech-scents
hit
the flawless box triumphs.
(My favourite is the ‘accidental tech-scents’ – I would never had come up with that without Metro’s assistance! It’s not often you can say that about poetry…)
Hope to see you Sunday for some cut-and-stick fun…
Commentaires