Description

THE WORKSHOP

The Fruiting Body of: Poetics of Decomposition & Entanglement

From being heralded as world-destroying parasites to lauded as radical metaphors for a more connected way of living, fungi have spread their mycelial hyphae deep into the substrate of the 21st-century imagination. In this two-day workshop, we’ll sift through the “resonant sources” tucked away in our junk drawers, note-taking apps, internet archives, local news, and public spaces, drawing on fungi’s capacity to remediate, filter, entangle, and decompose.

As Anna Tsing notes in “Unruly Edges: Mushrooms as Companion Species,” wandering and the love of mushrooms engender one another. The writing in this workshop will similarly embrace an openness to keeping our eyes attuned for, and perhaps stumbling into, what delights us in time-earned stockpiles of latent text. We’ll use found texts and images to “forest” various poetic forms, along with their subterranean, enantiodromiac counterparts: our attention to them.

On day one, we’ll engage in a kind of saprobic poetics, bringing with us residual texts. If you’re someone with a drawer of stockpiled materials but not quite sure what to do with them, this is your opportunity to comb through and make use of your collection. Any old scrap, note, letter, poem, or postcard will do. Like saprobic fungi decomposing forest debris, we’ll pull apart the unruly edges and seams of our “leaf litter” to reconstitute our clutter into new poems.

On day two, we’ll shift to an ecto-mycorrhizal poetics, openly discussing favorite works, new & classic; eye-catching local news stories, the stranger & mundaner the better; and overheard snippets from conversation, wherever people are peopling. This half of the workshop will serve as a kind of mycelial network through which the “fruiting body” of new writing can emerge. Together, we’ll pool found ephemera into a shared Google Drive, creating an archive and, with it, new hyphal connections, and by the end, poems!

WHEN & WHERE

Saturday & Sunday May 16 & 17 :  8:30-10:30 AM PST / 9:30-11:30 AM MST / 10:30 AM-12:30 PM CST / 11:30 AM-1:30 PM EST The workshop will take place virtually via Zoom. Upon registration, you will be sent the link closer to the event.

REGISTRATION

To bring poetry to the people, we are offering our workshops on a donation basis. To support our Tiny Resident, we recommend a $25-50 sliding donation. That said, please feel welcome to pay any amount that you can! All funds will be used to support Tiny Spoon’s Tiny Residency Program.

MEET YOUR WORKSHOP LEAD

Residing in Kansas City, MO, Anthony Procopio-Ross stewards youth at a local nonprofit and teaches night classes. His poems, photos, and collages appear in Birdcoat Quarterly, Kansas City Review, Bear Review, MemeZine Lit, Inflectionist Review, Wild Roof Journal, Outskirts Lit, McNeese Review, Laurel Review, and others. He can often be found photographing and writing about fellow residents and visitors of Charlotte Street Foundation. He’s been awarded residencies and grants from organizations including ArtsKC, Tallgrass, Art Farm Nebraska, and MU Extension. Across his practice, he considers what happens off to the side of dominant discourses, interfacing with the people, traditions, and writing that quietly shape our shared, everyday life.

Mushroom photography on this page is part of Anthony’s collection.