Surface Tension: Poetry & Visual Art course

What happens when a poem begins to think like a painting?

In this four-week online workshop ran by Chloe Elliott, we’ll explore the ways visual art can challenge and introduce alterity into what we write about, as well as how we write.

Looking closely at paintings and photographs by artists such as Helen Frankenthaler, Salman Toor, Joan Mitchell, Ithell Colquhoun, Rachel Jones, Claude Cahun, Francesca Woodman and Pixy Liao, we’ll consider how questions of surface, abstraction, gesture and composition might find new lives in language.

Through close reading/viewing and free writing, we’ll experiment with and write our own poems that borrow from the logic of painting and photography.

Together, we’ll embrace the page as a visual field in its own right. We’ll explore how ways of seeing might become ways of writing, and how we can develop new approaches to image, form and poetic attention.