“Compost and Junk Poetics”
“All writing is garbage.”
Antonin Artaud
Compost is the act of breaking living works into pieces that can be used to create new art. This workshop-based course will ask you to analyze the ways in which ordinary language and the transcendental practice of attention can be used to craft and create poetry. We will generate work using found poems, surrealist techniques like automatic writing, cut-ups, and other types of recycled writing. Like sanitary workers and gardeners, you will get your hands dirty repurposing language, cultivating bountiful poetic ground for it to grow, and composing work that glitters with materiality. Critical texts in the practice of ecopoetics, lectures, visual art, films, and poems from contemporary and historical figures operating in the compost lineage will be studied. Some of those folks are Walt Whitman, Jed Rasula, Joyelle McSweeney, Ted Berrigan, Eleni Sikelianos, GC Waltrep, and Tommy Pico.
Professor Evan Gray
T/TH 9:30–10:45 and 2:00–3:15
Course poster for ENG 3651-101/102, Creative Writing - Poetry: Compost and Junk Poetics, with Prof. Evan Gray, Spring 2027: a collage of garden greens above a landfill, with an Antonin Artaud quotation.
