A Writing Workshop with Rose Zinnia
Poetic Mimesis & Defamiliarization
Pictura Gallery at FAR Center for Contemporary Arts
202 S. Rogers Street
Tickets $12
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About this event
In our writing (& art) practice we can often (consciously and unconsciously) become too familiar and comfortable in our process. In writing, this can look like writing about the same thing or in a similar way each time—at the level of sentence structure, diction, narrative and meaning-making, or even form. It can feel difficult to get out of our habits, comfortable and productive as they are. This workshop will help us explore new ways of making, engaging with new processes so we might explore new ways of writing/creating. To find new paths toward our intuition and play, we will practice a couple of exercises together which I call mimesis and defamiliarization.
Following Claire Warden’s processes for her show Mimesis at Pictura Gallery, we will explore a few techniques for defamiliarizing ourselves from our well-trodden processes to mimetisize new processes of writing. We will less “write” poems and more “make” them. We all have our favorite neuropathways (highly-myelinated) for making language/poems/art, but the discussions and practices we will engage in in this workshop will open new pathways for our creative possibility.
This workshop will teach you how to write a poem that moves into the illegibility through secondary and tertiary processes of engaging with language as the building block of poems. We’ll directly engage with Warden’s art by unconsciously word-storming—looking at the prints and writing what words come to mind, then re-arranging text to make something wholly unplannable. We will also play with revision through defamiliarization: making new poems from supposedly “finished” poems. Bring your own poem to revise, or I will also provide poems to work with.