Haley Larson is a poet, media artist, and professor whose work connects collage, digital media, travel, visual arrangement, fractured syntax, and experimental form. She is Associate Professor of English at University of Massachusetts Global, where her teaching and research span poetry and poetics, critical media studies, creative writing, and digital media production.
Larson earned an MFA in Creative Writing–Poetry from Colorado State University and a PhD in English from the University of Iowa. Her dissertation, Writing That Reads: Collage Poetics and Aesthetic Techniques as Media Literacies, reflects a sustained interest in the meeting points among literary form, visual culture, and media practice.
From Charles Bridge
“From Charles Bridge” moves through Prague, Wenceslas Square, Kafka, real estate, photographs, relationships, and the uneasy experience of inhabiting a city while also observing oneself from a distance. Travel becomes a way of examining intimacy, independence, and the stories attached to place.
A bridge is already a structure of relation. It connects separated banks while creating a viewpoint suspended between them. Larson’s title gives that position a literary function: the speaker sees a city from a crossing and experiences place through movement.
Adriana Grant’s travel and roadside collage offers a neighboring practice in which place emerges through selected visual fragments, public language, weather, and movement.
Travel and mediated looking
Travel changes perception by making ordinary systems newly visible. Street signs, transit, architecture, food, real estate, photographs, and public monuments gain intensity because the traveler lacks the automatic familiarity of a resident.
At the same time, travel is already mediated by maps, books, photographs, literary references, and expectations. Kafka enters Prague before the speaker encounters particular streets; images of the city shape the visit in advance.
Larson’s poetry uses this doubled perception as material. The city is experienced through physical presence and through cultural images already circulating around it.
Fishing and Other Skills
“Fishing and Other Skills” is formally more fractured. Its staggered phrases, broken syntax, repeated spatial shifts, and abrupt images create a field in which pursuit, escape, urban night, fire, machinery, sleep, and danger remain in motion.
The title treats fishing as one skill among others, which gives the poem a procedural undertone. Fishing requires attention, patience, equipment, timing, and response to conditions. Those qualities become useful metaphors for reading a poem built from fragments.
The reader also has to wait for relation, follow partial signals, and notice what moves through gaps.
Visual arrangement
The poem’s visual arrangement matters as much as its vocabulary. Meaning develops through interruption and spacing, giving the page a compositional role alongside syntax and sound.
Shira Dentz’s visual syntax offers a neighboring practice where typography, white space, fragmentation, and acoustic recurrence determine how thought moves across the page.
Larson’s spatial design asks the eye to make decisions. A phrase placed apart from another can suggest hesitation, distance, interruption, or simultaneous action.
Collage poetics
Collage brings materials from different sources into one field. In poetry, these materials can include quotation, image, public language, memory, digital media, narrative fragment, and visual arrangement.
Larson’s scholarly work treats collage as a form of media literacy because juxtaposition teaches readers to notice how source, context, and framing shape meaning.
This makes collage an analytical practice as well as an aesthetic one. A fragment carries traces of its earlier context and acquires another function after being moved.
Media literacy and poetic form
Digital media environments present language, image, video, interface, advertisement, and data simultaneously. Reading them requires movement among modes.
Larson’s poetry and teaching respond to this condition by treating literary form as one part of a larger media ecology. A poem can borrow the discontinuity of a screen, the framing of photography, the cut of film, or the layered arrangement of collage.
Oscar Schwartz’s poetry of digital attention provides another perspective on writing shaped by networked culture, rapidly changing signals, and mediated perception.
Photography and distance
Photographs appear in Larson’s travel writing as objects that preserve and alter experience. A photograph can stabilize one view of a city while removing sound, duration, peripheral movement, and the changing position of the observer.
This makes photography a useful figure for memory. The image seems precise while leaving most of the original event outside its frame.
Poetry can respond by restoring movement around the image: what happened before, what remained outside the picture, and what the speaker understands differently later.
Teaching and cross-media practice
Larson’s teaching includes creative writing, literature, publishing, film, digital media, rhetoric, and design. These fields create a broad practical context for her poems.
Pedagogy reinforces attention to how forms communicate. A poem, film, web page, photograph, or designed object organizes a reader’s or viewer’s path through decisions of sequence, hierarchy, framing, and emphasis.
This cross-media teaching practice supports a poetics in which the page is one medium among several and literary attention remains responsive to the visual and digital world.
Collage, travel, and American poetry
Larson’s work belongs within contemporary American poetry where page-based writing, visual media, travel, criticism, film, and pedagogy can operate as parts of one creative practice.
Her poems show how travel can become a problem of framing and how collage can become a method of reading. Cities, screens, photographs, relationships, and broken syntax meet inside forms designed to keep perception active.