Poetry Club: Coffee Shop Collage

do the shells still hear

Poetry Collage Comes to the Club

We’ve been wanting to do poetry collage with the Every Day Poems poetry club for a while. So, finally, off we went to the coffee shop with a few simple tools in our tote…

• kid scissors (why not? more fun)
• a sketch book
• bottle of glue (glue stick is better, but we started with what was available in the drawer!)
• a small stack of magazine and catalog pages
• the opening line to Do the shells still hear

Poetry collage is the perfect pairing to poetry reading, if you want to get into a kind of “poetry mind” groove. While at first you may feel an urgency to get it done, you quickly realize you need to enter a different mind space. Letting go, letting the images sift through your fingers (and your scissors), you begin to experience what the best poetry reading gives you:

• a sense of timelessness
• a release of “what should be” and “what has been,” as the images take on a life of their own in their new context
• a relief from your cares, as you begin to make new meaning from old fragments

In this way, Do the shells still hear was a great way to begin. It’s a little poem that asks what fragments still carry once they’re removed from their original wholeness and context. Sometimes only the artist will know what a fragment bears. Sometimes (often, in fact), fragments transcend their past and surprise even the artist.

Try It: Poetry Club Coffee Shop Collage

1. Take a little tote to the coffee shop, having filled it with the poetry collage tools noted above.

2. Take a line from Do the shells still hear or any of our recent Every Day Poems:

The Missed Connections Ad Writes Itself
If I can Stop One Heart from Breaking
Sensei
Meta-Verse
Boating in Autumn

3. Make a poetry collage. Take time to simply enjoy the process.

4. Want to share? Put your Every Day Poems poetry collage on Instagram, Pinterest, or Notes, and share your link to it in the comment box below.

If you share by October 1, we might feature your collage in an upcoming Poetry Club!

Another View of Our Poetry Collage

It was fun to make this poetry collage! The part that took the longest? Piecing together the words. We might be inclined to handwrite in the future. 🙂

Photo by ReCycledChyld Studio, Creative Commons, via Unsplash. Poetry collage by

LL

.