Lyceum Series: Lisa Huffaker – The Poet As Propector: Mining Found Text

Welcome to the lyceum. These free, monthly workshops are held on the third Saturday of the month, and offer writers of every genre and skill level an opportunity to learn, experiment and develop their craft. We hope you’ll join us!

Invigorate your poetry by delving into the goldmine of existing language, already at hand. We’ll explore a range of inspiring practices, from word-collecting and cloud-seeding, to collage/cut-ups and erasures. We’ll walk the gorgeous, blurry boundary between poetry and visual art, and draw inspiration from the work of Mary Ruefle, Sarah J. Sloat, Katy Didden, Jennifer Sperry Steinorth, and others. Whether you choose to grow poems entirely from found language, or build a word collection to catalyze your writing one surprise at a time, the language all around us is a motherlode, if you know how to dig.

Lisa Huffaker integrates poetry, visual art, and performance in hybrid forms. Her writing appears in The Georgia Review, Pleiades, Cincinnati Review, Sixth Finch, Diagram, and elsewhere. Pegasus Contemporary Ballet recently premiered Words For a Resonant Space, a new dance work built on her poetry, and Pierce Planetarium recently featured her hybrid of poetry, full-dome art projections, and music. Excerpts of her ongoing book project, a collage/erasure transformation of a 1963 “self-improvement” book for wives, have been exhibited internationally as part of TU Delft and Cornell Tech’s 3rd Workshop on Obfuscation, and widely published in journals. Watch for forthcoming excerpts of the project in Massachusetts Review and The Iowa Review.