Found Poetry

Designed for participants with no prior writing background, this workshop guides the group through selecting, rearranging, and reframing language found in everyday texts to create original poems. Source materials may or may not include instruction manuals, medication pamphlets, grocery lists, junk mail, grant applications, utility bills, etc. By noticing creative possibilities in the mundane, participants explore new ways of working with language.

elika kindly invites participants to bring source materials they are interested in exploring during the workshop.

elika mojtabaei الیکا مجتبایی is an Iranian-born writer, costume designer, and dramaturg working in performance, film, and installation art. Through colour, texture, surrealist gestures, and the poetry of the unsaid, her work interrogates how language and apparel have been weaponized to marginalize, control, and erase. The movement and stillness of bodies, the power and limitations of fabric, and the joys and failures of words inspire her. She wrote, designed and produced the short film “a film about a uterus”. Her poetry has appeared in SAD Mag. She has collaborated with vAct, Jin-me Yoon, Theatre Conspiracy, Company 605, Alexis Fletcher, Studio 58 and others. Her installation/performance TechniCowlour was exhibited at Centre A Gallery. She is currently developing a new play, Draw Me a Home, based on children’s experiences of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), exploring the interconnectivity of oral, visual, and haptic storytelling. elika co-leads the experimental multidisciplinary company The Biting School and co-founded No Small Feat Collective.