Linden Creates > Poetry Masterclass

Join Manisha Anjali in this one-day course about poetry and the archive. 

Configuring the poet as a historian, this workshop examines the relationship between poetry and the archive. Whether we are exploring historical documents, field recordings, photographs, letters or family heirlooms, creative archival research is an important process for the poet, often with radical and political illuminations. Poetic language and cultural memory intersect to create new historical documents, which facilitate provoking dialogue between the past and present. How can we responsibly research and work with historical documentation? How do we interrogate silences in the archive, as we consider historical power dynamics – who is in the story, who records it, and how?

Bring an archival object to the workshop. This may be printed historical materials, photographs, found objects, letters, periodicals, family trees or an heirloom. We will practice ways of rendering the object into poetic form.

Learning outcomes:

• Archival methodology: aspects of creative archival research
• What to consider when using archival material for poetry
• How to interrogate silence in the archive and silence in poetic form
• Methods of rendering aspects of the archive in poetic language
• Experimentation with poetic strategy and form

Manisha Anjali is the author of Naag Mountain (Giramondo, 2024). She is the founder of Neptune, a research and documentation platform for dreams, visions and hallucinations. Manisha was a recipient of BLINDSIDE’s Regional Arts & Research Residency at Mooramong, a Writer-in-Residence at Incendium Radical Library and a Hot Desk Fellow at The Wheeler Centre. 

If you have any access requirements, please check our access page.