Register for Fall 2025 Life as Rehearsal for the Poem and Poetics as Cosmology!

Fall 2025 Life as Rehearsal for the Poem and Poetics as Cosmology, facilitated by CPL Founding Director Paul E. Nelson, begin next week! Register now to join these open form-focused workshops! In Fall  2025, we’ll explore a short history of Projective/Outside North American Poetry, focused on:

How can one’s poetics be a cosmology and how can one maintain some experience of the Poetry Postcard Fest, & allow one’s life as a creative participant in the world to rise in one’s personal hierarchy of duties/activities? How is the projective poem an antidote to Silicon Valley attention fracking? An alternative to A.I. Slop? Will you let the machines do your thinking?

Learn more about the workshop dates and register HERE. Contact us HERE to learn more about available scholarships. Cass, a previous workshop attendee, had this to say about Poetics as Cosmology:

I have taken Paul Nelson’s “Poetics as Cosmology” workshop on two occasions and have gained so much from doing so. Paul exposes participants to wide-ranging works concerning both contemporary poetic concerns as well as the larger tradition of poetics upon which the Cascadia Poetics Lab is founded. Participants can expect to read both about the corporate extraction of human attention and the matter of angels in the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke–all while being asked to engage in the practice of projective verse and presence in everyday life. Not to mention that Paul offers generous feedback to each writer in the class. Paul’s guidance has pushed me, after the workshop, to explore my local geography, learn about my watershed, and keep noticing what is going on around me, and to let all of these things percolate into poetry. I would recommend the workshop to anyone who wants to seriously delve into poetry as a lived practice.