No prior knowledge of found poetry or poetry is needed to fully participate.
Found poetry is typically a process of locating individual words and sounds that stand out to you, reconnecting fragments throughout a whole text. In that sense, it is akin to how Autistic and monotropic perception, wherein detail or individual items stand out before, and if ever, the overall space materializes; it’s seeing the coffee cup before the cafe.
Within found poetry, the individual words stand out before the overall sentence. The singular word opens to another Autistic trait, echolalia, the involuntary repetition of words or phrases, the pleasure found in repetition. It’s the attempt at an understanding through repeated inhabitation of the sounds of the words, listening to them again and again. In the repetition, they don’t loosen the value bestowed upon them in the text, but they make themselves felt to the repeating body, trying them on, as a way to see how they fit.
Echolalia is more than just repeating; it’s also redrawing, redoing, re-moving, as in retracing one's own movements in space. It becomes a starting point of found poetry, and each time the words are repeated, they slightly alter, as artist William Kentridge has said of the recurring thought while circling the studio, ‘stuck inside the zeotrope and the repetitive actions can not be escaped, knowing that the activity is both avoiding the questions of how to actually make the drawing or to write the sentence but it’s also essential a productive procrastination.’
Outline (2 hr total):
I will do a presentation on Found Poetry, which will include examples of found poems. (35 min)
Short discussion about Found Poetry, sparked by the presentation. (20 min)
Introduction of the workshop. (5 min)
Participatory Workshop, which also includes time for people to take a break. (30 min)
Workshop: Everyone will be asked to move around the shop and collect words from the spine or cover of the books available at The Pond.
From these collected words, everyone will write their own poem(s).
Reading of poems and potential discussion of the poems, the process, and anything else that might have come up. (30 min)
Troels Steenholdt Heiredal (b. 1984, he/him/they) is an Autistic / neuroqueer artist and architect examining the differences between explaining and exploring disability. He currently lives and works in Taipei, Taiwan. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Wordgathering, Brink Literary Journal, Riddle Fence, Vallum, ANMLY, Taipei Poetry Collective, and Otherwise Magazine.
This event is sign-up! Write to us at read@thepondcph.com to secure your spot.