Fall Virtual Poetry Intensive: Unreadable Poetry

When: October 28 – December 2, 2026 (Wednesdays, 6:30–8:30 PM EST)

Duration: 6 Weeks

Format: Virtual, via Zoom

Workshop Overview:

To call a piece of writing “unreadable” is to render a rather flexible, but usually damning, aesthetic judgement: too boring, too gruesome, badly written, too obscene, too dense; or in a more literal sense unable to be read, for the words therein have no meaning, have wasted away to the point of illegibility, are visually cluttered, or are otherwise restricted or inaccessible. In all of these valences, unreadability is something the writer is meant to avoid, even if it means settling for being “merely” readable. But much of the history of experimental poetry has embraced unreadability as an incredibly generative domain of creative expression, formal innovation, and political resistance. In this six-week intensive, participants will read, respond to, and create poetry that purposefully plays with forms of unreadability. 

We will engage with concrete/visual poetry, collage poetry, sound poetry, transgressive writing, digital poetry, nonsense poetry, and book arts. Examples include, but are not limited to, works by Aram Saroyan, Tracie Morris, David Melnick, Tan Lin, Douglas Kearney, and Ilse Garnier. Through assigned “readings,” writing exercises, and peer workshops, participants will challenge the very boundaries of what it means to read and write poetry. 

About the Instructor:

Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué is a poet and scholar living in Chicago. He is most recently the author of Losing Miami (The Accomplices, 2019) and Madness (Nightboat Books, 2022), which was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle's Thom Gunn Award in Gay Poetry and the TS Eliot Foundation’s Four Quartets Prize. He is also co-editor of An Excess of Quiet: Selected Sketches by Gustavo Ojeda, 1979-1989. He is currently Humanities Teaching Fellow in English at the University of Chicago, where he works in the study of sexuality.