Poetry Is Where You Find It
with Jane Desmond
Saturday, August 24, 2024, 10:00 a.m–1:00 p.m
Tuition: $75
This workshop includes lunch at 1:00 p.m.
This half-day workshop invites participants to find the poetry in Saugatuck’s history by transforming observations of the local landscape and its social history into works of visual and textual art. Taking the rich cultural and ecological history of Saugatuck and Ox-Bow as our starting point, we’ll explore and then transform copies of historical documents, which will be provided, into “found poems” through simple techniques of selection, amplification, and visual enhancement. Participants will leave with a hand-made work of art combining text, color, and line that reveals hidden expressive meaning in plain documents from the past, like storm reports, newspaper headlines, and ephemera regarding the history of Ox-Bow itself. No background in writing poetry or formal art training is required! Participants of all levels of experience can enjoy this process to create something new from the past.
Jane Desmond is a poet, anthropologist, and former choreographer who works broadly across the arts and humanities. Her work has appeared in books, national print journals, on television, in film, and even on a billboard. As a teacher, she brings several decades of experience to teaching interdisciplinary classes both in the U.S. and abroad, including at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where has been featured multiple times on the list of "Teachers ranked as Excellent by their Students." Her creative and scholarly work has been funded by the NYState Council on the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Commission, and through residencies at Write On Door County!, the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation and the Cummington Community for the Arts. Skilled in archival work, she will draw on Saugatuck's special history and local archives to bring the past alive in "found poetry" workshops that combine words and visuals and are easily accessible by both poets, visual artists, and the general public alike. Come find a poem in the past!
