This is an in-person workshop that takes place at Inprint House.
Language as Material: A Generative Workshop
The painter Edgar Degas once lived for weeks as a vexed poet. Despite his best attempts, he could not shake the flatness in his verse. And so, desperately inspired, he sought the advice of a friend: the famed writer Stéphane Mallarmé. “Dear Stéphane,” Degas began, “I cannot understand how I can have such great ideas—and yet I write such horrid poems!”
Mallarmé quipped, “Dear Degas, poems are made of words, not ideas.”
In this generative workshop, we will take Mallarmé’s quip seriously as we consider language as poetic material. We will begin by looking at experimental poems by writers such as Harryette Mullen, Reginald Dwayne Betts, Charles Olson, Douglas Kearny, Robert Smithson, Ted Berrigan, and others, alongside some paintings, drawings, and collages by visual artists such as Hans Hofmann, Ray Johnson, and Josef and Anni Albers.
After discussing the effects of collage, erasure, and intertextuality, we will apply these crosspollinated-techniques to our own in-class writing. Students can expect to leave with a foundational understanding of experimental poetics and numerous poems of their own. Oh, and students will learn some formatting tricks on Microsoft Word, too.
Mathew Weitman’s debut poetry collection, The Campus Novel: Poems, is forthcoming with Tupelo Press. His work appears in Copper Nickel, The Georgia Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. He is the winner of the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, the AWP Kurt Brown Award, the Inprint Verlaine Prize in Poetry, and has received residencies and fellowships from MacDowell, UCROSS, and Millay Arts. He is co-editor and co-translator of Rolando Cárdenas: On the Life and Work of a Chilean Master (Pleiades Press, 2026). Currently, he is pursuing his PhD at the University of Houston as an Inprint Brown Foundation Fellow where his teaching has been recognized with the Provost Teaching Excellence Award.
