Sunday, May 4, 2025; 1 - 3pm
Sliding Scale: $15/$20/$25
Modernist writers, including T.S. Eliot and Marianne Moore, experimented with incorporating found text into their poetry. The goal? To explore a subject through multiple perspectives and voices, thus adding dimension or depth to the subject. Incorporating other voices also places less emphasis on the “I” of authorship.
In the first thirty minutes of the class the instructor will cover the concept of found text and provide examples, from his own work and from the work of others, on how text may be interwoven into a poem. For the following thirty minutes, participants will work with their own found text and lines of poetry with the goal of completing one or more draft poems. In the final sixty minutes, participants will be given the opportunity to share and discuss their work.
Participants should bring newspaper articles, magazines, advertising brochures, nature guides, et cetera, in print or on a laptop computer or tablet, pertaining to the subgenre of poetry they typically write, from which to select found text to incorporate into their poems.
About the Instructor: Dave Seter is a poet, essayist, and author of the poetry collections Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences (Cherry Grove Collections, 2021) and Night Duty (Main Street Rag, 2010). His poems have won the KNOCK Ecolit Prize and placed third in the William Matthews competition. He is the recipient of two Pushcart nominations. He has been an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and has served on the Board of Directors of Marin Poetry Center. He earned his undergraduate degree in civil engineering from Princeton University and his graduate degree in humanities from Dominican University of California. He has previously been a guest instructor and panelist at the Dominican University of California Low-Residency MFA in Creative Writing Program. He has been named Sonoma County Poet Laureate 2024-2026.