CPF9 Friday Workshops

The 9th Cascadia Poetry Festival is fast approaching! October 10-12, 2025, join us for a gathering and celebration of poetry and place in Cascadia. To kick off the festival, we are hosting workshops on Friday, October 10. Workshop Gold Pass holders will meet the CPL team at the Rainier Beach Community Club on Friday, where they will check in and be directed to the location of their workshop.

Read all about the Friday workshops held below! Gold passes are still available to purchase, with an option to attend workshops AND readings, or just the readings. We hope you will join us! REGISTER HERE.

MORNING WORKSHOPS

Ekphrasis: Writing Inspired by Visual Art with Brenda Cardenas

One artistic form can inspire another, creating profound connections, sometimes in fun and unexpected ways. In this generative workshop, you will learn about various approaches poets take to ekphrasis, and then, using prompts to guide you, write a poem in conversation with a work of visual art that inspires, intrigues, puzzles, or moves you. The workshop leader will supply many postcard reproductions of well-known artworks that you can choose from.

Writing Poetry: A Narrow Path to the Interior with Katie Sarah Zale

Poets use imagery from their life experiences. It has been said that poets write the same poem over and over, merely adding information that reflects new experiences. These new experiences do not replace the old; they give depth and breadth to the old ones. Sam Hamill would say that being a poet means following one narrow path, which is the self, to the interior. People never change as much as they expand their perspectives. In this generative workshop, you will come to understand the foundational imagery that guided Sam Hamill’s poetry and explore your own. You will discover tools that make your poetry guileless in tone and powerful in its effort to evoke rooted emotions.

Blooming Difference: Exploring poetry, microcuentos and memoir at Kubota Garden with Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs

Please bring a notebook, pen or pencil, your favorite writing implement, a few pictures of you or someone you love in nature, in another country, wonderful, if not it’s ok. We will begin by listening to three of my poems inspired by nature: “This is the moment,” “Did you know?,” “Until we lose the ocean.”

Investigative Poetry with Sharon Thesen

Attendees will explore pictorial possibilities towards creativity, sing, dance and understand the power of moving energy around the park, in order to produce poetry and microcuentos in English, Spanish or French.  If you want to experience joy, please join us!

AFTERNOON WORKSHOPS

Open Churchyard: Lyric and Form For People Who Hate Lyric and Form with Robert Lashley

Do most poetic forms make you wish you didn’t know how to read? Even if you are a dedicated poet yourself? Then this class is for you! Looking at the examples of Gwendolyn Brooks, Colleen McElroy, and Wanda Coleman we will examine such techniques as stream of consciousness, breath, internal rhythm, and verb usage to see how form poems work. Then we will try out a range of techniques in short free write exercises. Bring form poems you are working on!

Eco Workshop with Brenda Hillman

Our Eco workshop will bring together outer and inner worlds; we will walk, make observations, hear a little about what we are seeing, take notes, read a little bit of what we have written to non-human entities, and then return to read and write. Please bring a notebook and a writing instrument, something you have been working on that has to do with the natural world, and four or five words that you have been meaning to use.

Poetry as Interventionist Event with Roxi Power

Poetry in a time of crisis best responds by becoming an event that “changes the situation” in the words of the Situationist, Henri Lefebvre. What if “the situation” we change is our own habitual practices and preferences that we bring to poetry?  Rather than simple reportage or cathartic complaint, we might engage social practice in our poetry through becoming a shape-shifter, resisting the usual genres and mindsets we turn to for comfort or confirmation. What if, in the words of Rimbaud, “I is another”? What if the self doesn’t exist in the way we think it does? If so, we may not need to bring it to all our poetic projects.  In this workshop, we will explore some tactics for intervening on our usual expectations of poetry–our own and others’–as a first move for intervening in political situations with our poems. We will explore whether, in Paul Hoover’s words, “Poems We Can Understand” are always the best approach to our reading, writing, and editing practices. Intervening on our poetic “selves” encourages our work to be more kinetic and fresh, capable of changing our own and our readers’ minds. Intervening on genres’ set boundaries encourages a conversational approach to creativity. We will learn about, then write from, a variety of practices outlined in the trans-genre anthology series Power edits, Viz. Inter-Arts, including aesthetic moves (the Situationist notion of writing-as-event); art as social practice (Nato Thompson’s interventionist art and Nicolas Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics); as well as spiritual concepts (the Buddhist notion of the wisdom of emptiness). Participants will be gifted a copy of Viz. Inter-Arts–either the “Event” or the “Interventions” edition–to use in our workshop and in our practice, going forward.