Part of The Poetry Society of New York's Weekly Virtual Workshop Series.

With poet Chelsea Harlan!

Language, as we know, is ever-evolving. You might say it’s a recyclable material, reused and repurposed and regenerating all the time. Poets are the great regenerators of language, collecting and arranging little words on little pages as though they’ve never appeared together exactly like that before. But what of the words and phrases that are explicitly “borrowed” from other sources? What constitutes plagiarism in this, our muddled and befuddled age of artificial intelligence, where robots write poetry too? Without marching off too deep in the weeds, in this fun and productive workshop we’ll discuss what it means to borrow language and how it’s sometimes (often) problematic, but how poetry offers us a means of regeneration that can excite its possibility — language as plaything, song, revolution, balm; language as collaborative effort toward greater meaning. Yes, all poets are thieves! Together, we’ll look at some poems and try to guess their borrowed lines and sources. We’ll look at the cento as a form and talk about poems made entirely of borrowed material (100% recycled, baby). As a generative exercise, participants will mod-podge pieces of borrowed text with their own original ideas and images, and we’ll marvel at what results. We’ll also write a group poem, wonderfully quilted from all our efforts. Bring a few lines or phrases that you’ve pocketed from somewhere else to get us started!

About the Instructor: Chelsea Harlan is the author of Bright Shade, selected by Jericho Brown as the winner of the 2022 American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize. She holds a BA from Bennington College and an MFA in Poetry from CUNY Brooklyn College, where she was a Truman Capote Fellow. She lives in Appalachian Virginia, where she was born and raised, and where she works at a small public library.

* *This workshop will take place on Zoom.**