Sampling the Hors d’Oeuvres: Exploratory Poetics in Archives and Special Collections

Going beyond a typical show-and-tell, this lesson plan engages students with primary materials as ingredients for creative work, with attention to the ways researchers read and notice in archives and special collections. This hands-on creative activity helps students to identify and analyze many facets of materials in a special collections setting, and it allows students to explore those materials together. Students create found poems based on a prompt distributed by the librarian-instructor and then engage in reflective sharing of the poems. The prompt draws students toward the textual, paratextual, and metadata elements of materials, and the sharing of poems among students highlights the variety of their observations.