Poetry and the Document: A Workshop

Our lives are ruled by paper: birth certificates. Leases. Contracts. Yet, strangely, these documents are so dry. They can make us feel as much as a poem—but they don’t have the spark of life in them.
In this workshop for all ages, Montreal-area poet Tara McGowan-Ross takes emerging writers through the process that she developed to write her document-poem STRIKE MOTION —a resistance poem layered on the actual document her university department used to go on strike in 2015. By injecting humour, imagery, beauty, and metaphor into the documents that shape our lives, we have an endless supply of writing material—and a truer archive for our brief and precious life on Earth.
**This workshop will follow the November 5, 2021 Atwater Poetry Project featuring Tara McGowan-Ross and Ashley Obscura, 7:00-8:00 pm in the Atwater Library Auditorium.
Tara McGowan-Ross is an urban Mi’kmaw multidisciplinary artist and writer. She is the author of the poetry collections Girth and Scorpion Season, and the nonfiction collection Nothing Will Be Different, forthcoming in fall 2021. She hosts the Drawn and Quarterly’s Indigenous Literatures Book Club and reviews experimental and independent Montreal theatre for Broadwayworld.
To register: [email protected].
Co-presented with the Atwater Poetry Project.