This is an in-person workshop that takes place at Inprint House
Erasure & Collage
How are contemporary poets using image and text together to speak in registers that image or text alone can’t reach? In this weekend intensive, we’ll draw inspiration from mavericks like Sarah J. Sloat, Mary Ruefle, Lisa Olstein, and Jen Sperry Steinorth.
We’ll begin with erasure: poems made from existing texts by obscuring some language while allowing other words to remain visible. Then we’ll combine erasure with collage, building visual worlds around those surviving words and letting image and text shape each other on the page. Tools and materials will be provided, and participants are encouraged to bring their own—magazines, wrapping paper, stickers, artificial flowers, colored tape, thread—anything that might find new life in the work.
Come prepared with a multi-page document to use as your source text. Past examples include legal documents, science articles, archaic medical texts, other poets’ work, Twitter threads, horror novels, and historical documents. Think expansively and choose something that resonates. Together, we’ll explore the intersections of visual and linguistic meaning to arrive at new convergences of expression.
KT Herr is a writer, educator, and collagist with work appearing or forthcoming in The Adroit Journal, Massachusetts Review, Black Warrior Review, and elsewhere. KT holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College and a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston, where they were awarded a C. Glenn Cambor fellowship and the Inprint Paul Verlaine Prize in Poetry. The recipient of fellowships, residencies, and creative support from Vermont Studio Center, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, KT presently serves as Board Secretary for Four Way Books.
