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Poetry Lost and Found
a writing workshop with Tung-Hui Hu

Thursday
April 14, 6:00-8:30 p.m.
Cost: $40

***Tung-Hui Hu will be reading for the Edge Reading Series on Wednesday, April 13, 7:30 p.m.***

To register:
Please fill out a Registration Form or email casakeepers@casalibre.org for more information.

Program Description:

Poetry Lost and Found
In this workshop, we’ll write poems that are based on, inspired by, or even composed entirely out of found materials—whether old letters found in the attic, song lyrics, newspaper stories, antique encyclopedias and almanacs, or a stranger’s photos downloaded from the Internet. The workshop will be tailored to help each project, but we’ll also collectively address questions such as: What ways can “old” material spark new work? How can impersonal texts work inside the frame of a personal history, such as a poetic sequence about one’s family? How do you tackle ethical issues of appropriating materials? What are ways to restructure words that already have their own structure? We’ll also read a few authors who have worked with archives, turning the words and voices of others into poetry; these may include authors such as C.D. Wright, daughter of a court reporter, or Brenda Hillman, who writes through a Gold Rush-era diarist.

Bring in roughly 5 pages worth of materials of your choice to share with the class;
documents with a lot of text work best. Please photocopy anything valuable or one-of-a- kind as one exercise during this workshop will involve writing on the page.

 

Tung-Hui Hu is the author of three books of poems: The Book of Motion (2003), Mine (2007), and Greenhouses, Lighthouses, forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press. His next book-in-progress works with newspaper articles from the 1920s and 1930s. Described as a “contained surreal style that deftly shapes a philosophical argument” (Los Angeles Times), his writing has appeared in The New Republic, Ploughshares, Gastronomica, and Martha Stewart Living Radio. Hu teaches film and creative writing at the University of Michigan, where he is Assistant Professor of English.