"Homing What Haunts You: Exploring Poetry, TikTok and Freewriting" is a generative workshop that will re-imagine how we read, write, experience and express poetry. We’ll examine Junie Désil's question "how to write about what you carry but don't know?" from her collection eat salt | gaze at the ocean. We’ll use this as a portal to explore what we carry emotionally, physically, ancestrally and communally when we encounter a blank page or camera. We’ll think about how poets and performance artists Katie Numi Usher, Rajiv Mohabir, Ariana Brown, Dionne Brand, Gaiutra Bahadur, Aracelis Girmay, Etel Adnan and Shivanee Ramlochan frame the things we carry as hauntings in their poetry and TikTok performance videos.

We’ll take directions from poems. We’ll eat something salty and gaze at water while reading poems aloud to each other. We’ll think of poems as shapeshifters that can exist as words, brushstrokes and pixels. We’ll rewrite poems in different shapes and experiment with translating written words into a different medium. Participants will create a TikTok video or leporello book to store their poetry-experiments.

This class will be held in-person at the Abrons Arts Center.