Surfacing History: A Poetry and Graphic Arts Workshop

Instead of creating stable, easily decoded pages, we’ll create a series of -graphic poems,-layered surfaces of documents, historical records, maps, hand-written notes, pages from old books, our own writings, and pieces of everyday text and paper. We’ll start with investigative writing-researching events and landscapes at the intersection of civic and personal history, culling words, and fashioning poems and prose from what we find. Then, by collaging, soaking, wrinkling, writing, mark-making, and photocopying, our pages will gather the signs of wear and tear, personal use, distress-the look of history. Writers and artists we’ll study include Susan Howe, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Tom Phillips, Mary Kelly, Anselm Kiefer, Eugenio Dittborn.

No drawing experience is required; no purchase of materials required.