The poem as document: writing place through accumulation

The places we live, the selves who we are, and the writing we make can no longer be understood as singular. Other stories, other perspectives run just below the surface or thread themselves through it. A place understood in this way becomes stratified—layered with time and the bodies and objects it contains—rather than horizontal. Its depth indicates its complexity and its contradictions: all this in one space!

This workshop asks how we might write poems that look at place with an eye toward this multiplicity of presences. How can we write about where we are or where we have been, while thinking about who else has been there (or is there), what has happened there, and what has moved through that space? We'll use an excerpt from THE RINGS OF SATURN by W.G. Sebald and an excerpt from Carolyn Forché's long poem “On Earth” to think about documentation as a way of making writing and as a way to think the poem as an open, complex, and sometimes self-contradicting document of what is or has been in a place. The workshop will include discussion of the pieces of writing provided, as well as a number of exercises through which we'll question our ideas of place and the places we think about.

Please bring objects with you that recall a place or places you have been that you would like to write about—as many as you like. This could include plant material, photographs, soil samples, rocks or other specimens, souvenirs, quotations from others' writing or your own....

Éireann Lorsung's two collections, both from Milkweed, are Music For Landing Planes By (2007) and Her Book (2013); poems, stories, essays, and reviews appear in numerous journals. She lives in Belgium, where she edits 111O (111oh.com) and co-runs MIEL, a micropress (miel-books.com).

A previous WEM's Writer of the Month