A Thousand Words’ Worth: Turning Photographs into Poems

In December 2022, I was invited to conduct a poetry workshop at Orchard Library held in conjunction with a photography exhibition curated by Of Limits Collective.

The idea of marrying words and visuals has always intrigued me, and I believe that poets are painters in the basic sense, we just paint with words!

I started to look into the idea of Ekphrasis poetry as a framework for conducting these workshops and planned out the curriculum over a span of 2 weeks!

I used various visual mediums, such as Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings, and Saul Leiter’s photography, as examples to demonstrate how some poets have responded to these works.

Participants are then invited to bring a special photograph that means something to them, and respond to the photo by writing a poem. It could be as personal as expressing the story behind the photograph or as abstract as the idea or concept of the photo.

We had a lot of fun in this 2 hour session! ^_^

Participants are encouraged to use literary devices to enhance their writing, however advised not to worry about getting too technical as the aim of the course is to get them comfortable expressing themselves in the written word.

The reprised, improved version of this workshop is also available monthly at the Graceful Quills Studio. Find out more here.