Zoom out & Dig It All! Finding Poetry in Our On- and Offline Lives with Poet Urayoan Noel

This four-week generative workshop aims to encourage all us “Zoom’ed out” poets to zoom out in another sense: to embrace a broader view of what poetry can be on the page, the screen, and beyond. The workshop assumes that we don’t have to choose between print and digital (we can dig it all!), and that we can grow, innovate, and heal by bringing our writing closer to our everyday lives. For inspiration, we will examine work by a range of poets (artists’ books, smartphone poetry, hybrid forms of storytelling and collaboration), with special attention to diasporic and border-crossing poets whose work stresses the complex intersections of embodied space, writing, and technologies. We will work with 1-2 prompts per week, with the option to keep generating new pieces or to experiment with and reimagine existing ones. Our focus will be on solo work, but we will also try to daydream collaborative projects beyond market expectations of an atomized productivity.