Mapping Our Poems

In "The Archaeology of Knowledge," Michel Foucault writes, “The frontiers of a book are never clear-cut: beyond the title, the first lines, and the last full stop, beyond its internal configuration and its autonomous forms, it is caught up in a system of references to other books, other texts, other sentences: it is a node within a network.”

In this generative writing class, we will begin with a word or phrase, line or lines from another book of poetry. After mapping out ideas, feelings, rhythms, syntaxes and words we associate with the line or lines we have brought in, we will start work on our own poems.

(Throughout, we will engage in mini-breaks that can be incorporated into people’s everyday writing rituals in the future, to spur our creativity and collaboration as a workshop).

The lines we begin with may be embedded in the poem we write, or turn out…