This workshop was facilitated by Anna Percy on Wednesday 13th April at Marble Beer House in Chorlton. Here are the exercises so you can try them out even if you couldn’t make it!
Sculpted/Erasure Poem
Print off a piece of text or paste it into your Word browser. Either go along and erase parts to form a poem, or alternatively circle the parts you want to keep to form the basis of your poem.
Cento
Make a poem using a different line taken from a different poem for each line. Aim for ten lines, use the whole line and don’t change it or cut anything! Poetry Foundation is a good resource for this you can search by theme: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/
Pure Found Poem
Find a piece of text and transform it into a poem using line breaks. Don’t delete or change the order of the words. For this exercise I used a range of nonfiction books, but instruction manuals, reviews, articles etc are all good resources. The skill here is seeing the poetry in a non poetic language.
Cut-up
Using print or Word, cut out a number of words and phrases from as many passages as you can. For this, cutting and rearranging by hand is the most fun/interesting way to do this, as well as the most practical! You can cut up lines, single words anything goes on this one as long as you use the existing text.
Here are two articles from the Guardian website to print and cut up:
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/apr/10/jane-fonda-feminism-womens-rights http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/apr/10/secret-lives-of-women-shakespeare
Bonus!
If you are at home/in a library have a go at this: stack books on top of each other and use the titles to make a poem. It forms a kind of book title cento. I already had a go at this one: https://mostlynocturnalscribbler.wordpress.com/2016/04/12/back-on-the-equine-day-ten-prompt/
Don’t forgot to submit to our zine by midnight tonight!
And if you’re based in Manchester, come along (or compete in?!) our Found Poetry Slam next Monday 25th at Three Minute Theatre: https://www.facebook.com/events/941806922584545/
See you soon!
The Stirred quad is formed of Rebecca Audra Smith, Anna Percy, Jasmine Chatfield and Lenni Sanders.
Stirred Feminist Collective 
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