Event Type
The most intimate, erotic and absurdly surreal yet mundane elements of our life’s poetry can be found in the trash. Within the bin, we discard our hidden emotions and our state of health, the ways we nourish and destroy ourselves, the activities that make us feel alive or numb. Our trash is telling of our present, and poetry is what brings it together with memory and time. The trash is an honest, beautiful and scummy place to be. For this workshop, I would like to offer some Trash Poetics insight and practices to entice both the adventurous poets and writers of other genres to give scum a chance when crafting their own poetic narratives. I will offer a Trash Poetics ritual with prompts that dirty up their practice and throw a bit of tactile chaos into the idea of what it means to write. The exercises will help readers to cultivate erotic awareness of their own trash, literally and metaphorically, and to bring in an element of play into constructing a self-reflective poem. I will guide participants to explore their present identity and its relationship to their trash as a point of entry in approaching this Trash Poetics. The materials I will bring include their trash, scissors, pen, paper, glue… it's about getting creative, off the computer and into a more tactile experience of poetry. This sort of engagement with trash, poetry, and erotic awareness of the self will lead readers to consider the malleable nature of time, memory and identity within their work. Everyday objects layered with poetic perspective act as a warped looking glass—one in which we can reflect and reinterpret our relationship with our perception of our own truths and myths. By playing with our mundane humanness in unassuming ways, and subtly altering their presentation, purpose and context, I want to give the reader a sensual and human freedom to discover new notions of creative expression time as well as their inseparable role in the construction of poetry, memory and identity.
