How are ideas, emotions, and associations contained, carried, and transformed in found poems and metaphors? How do you embody or reinterpret images, fragmented texts, or the contents of a drawer? Do these elements impose constraint—or offer freedom?

Whether working with a found poem or a metaphor, we begin with what we have and often arrive somewhere unexpected.

In this session, we’ll explore a rich variety of examples, and participants will be encouraged to step beyond their comfort zones—writing in response to found materials and texts, and discovering surprising creative possibilities along the way.

About the facilitator:

Jennifer Wong (she/her) is a poet, writer and editor. She is the author of several collections including Letters Home (Nine Arches Press, 2020) and a pamphlet, “time difference”(Verve, 2024). Her new collection, Light Year, is forthcoming from Nine Arches Press in 2026. She is the author of Identity, Home and Writing Elsewhere: Contemporary Anglophone Chinese Diaspora Poetry (Bloomsbury, 2023) and co-editor…