As many others have said, I really enjoyed Monday’s collage workshop. I didn’t have much of a direction when I began, but I found it was interesting to forego the use of scissors at times and rip out certain shapes with my hands. While purely visual collages are often beautiful and provocative, I was interested in introducing words into mine because I’m a creative writing major. I love playing with language on the page, and I was curious to mix poetic and visual play. I generated a loose theme about reading/poetry and teaching by using a large image of a grandfather reading to a child. I love using words as a decorative element too, so on one side of the collage I wrote “Teach your children well” (from the song by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young) repeatedly to create a background in which the text is nearly indiscernible. I also used small bits from the magazines from the 50’s (I think they were called something like “Lifetimes), which had lots of poems and small stories within them. Repurposing and rearranging words in a new space and context really intrigues me. I took words and phrases from different portions of the magazine to make up no poetic fragments. For example, “Casual acquaintance/on my sunlit floor” and “Lead limbed/ lover/ in the kitchen.” It reminded me of magnetic poetry-the random word arrangements that people throw on their refrigerators. The realm of possibility for this type of wordplay is endless, and I love that. If we had more time in class, I would have continued to scrap different words and phrases from disparate sources to create new pieces of poetry, and perhaps create a more coherent poem? In addition to mixing the sources from which I gathered words, I also took this opportunity to play with different mediums in collage. I used glue and crumpled tissue paper (which I haven’t done since kindergarten!) as well as glitter, and even pieces of the Hamilton campus map. As collage itself is a conglomeration of disparate elements,  the open-ended nature of this workshop was quite fascinating and fun for me.