Lost & Found Poetry

The following works were created during the Lost & Found Poetry:

Writing Workshop with Fan Wu on December 18, 2022 in

Theatre Passe Muraille’s Backspace.

This workshop treated writing as a game of lost and found — inspired by MIRIAM’S WORLD by Naomi Jaye, a Tremendous Productions immersive experience presented by

Theatre Passe Muraille based on THE INCIDENT REPORT by Martha Baillie — alongside texts that we brought into the space and scraps of found material.

We took inspiration from Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, who arrays textbooks and treatises on a long table and collages them together to make her long prose-poetry lines; and Jordan Abel, whose Injun scoured colonial archives to wrest control over racist indigenous stereotypes. The power of found poetry is political, twofold: it not only registers resistance to historical violence and exclusion by re-contextualizing hegemonic discourses, but it also interrupts our own patterns of language by intermixing those patterns with strange, immiscible outside texts. And this game of lost & found is so fun to undertake in a group, as reading becomes treasure hunting and treasure hunting becomes composition. Please enjoy our quilts of scraps and rags, lovingly woven.