CPL Winter 2026 Workshops!
Keep your poetic light shining bright during the dark winter days with Cascadia Poetics Lab workshops! We’re excited to welcome poet Harold Rhenisch as a guest facilitator for the workshop The Poetics of Cascadian Land and Water! CPL board members Paul Nelson and Matt Trease will also be returning to facilitate continuations of their previous workshops. Read all about our Winter 2026 workshop offerings below!
The Poetics of Cascadian Land and Water with Harold Rhenisch
Saturdays 3-5:00 PM Pacific Time
January 10, 17, 24, 31 & February 7
Cost: $125.00 REGISTER HERE!
This is a workshop in poetic fusion. Cascadia began with a language that united cultures: Chinook Wawa. This series of workshops expands its gift of integration between the ancient languages of the Columbia and its new languages, French and English. To do so, it draws in American, Canadian, Wawa and North European poetries, with a concentration on opening doorways. Our goal overall is to speak as Cascadians, from here and from our rich linguistic tradition, emphasizing voice, person to person, people to land, and the past to an integrative future.
Thinkingwith: Writing Strategies for Reconnecting to Earth with Matt Trease
Sundays 3-5:00 PM Pacific Time
February 15, 22, March 1, 8, and 15, 2026
Cost: $125 REGISTER HERE!
Our current media landscape seems hooked on a doom loop, an apocalyptic dream of human self-annihilation from collapsing nation states and anarchy to climate change to AI terminators, to genocidal warmongering. In order to avoid going down with that ship, we, as humans, are going to need to flip the script, to learn to think differently. This lab will focus on writing strategies, applicable for poetry or prose, for breaking the spell that objectifies and cuts us off from the earth and from place and all the living beings that we (often) obliviously live in relationship with. We’ll do that by intentionally widening the socially-imposed conventions of “normal” perception via some minor alterations to our daily writing practices.
Life as Rehearsal for the Poem and Poetics as Cosmology with Paul Nelson
Poetics as Cosmology (PAC)
Thursdays 3-5 PM PDT
March 26, April 2, 9, 16, and 23, 2026
Life as Rehearsal for the Poem (LARFP)
Sundays 3-5 PM PDT
March 29, April 5, 12, 19, and 26, 2026
Cost: $125 REGISTER HERE!
Participate in reading and discussion of foundational essays, interviews, listening and other assignments, as well as spontaneous poetry composition exercises. In Winter 2026, we’ll explore a short history of Projective/Outside North America Poetry, focused on:
- George Bowering
- Fred Wah
- Daphne Marlatt
- Michael McClure
- Mary Norbert Kõrte
- John Olson
- Phyllis Webb
- Stephen Collis
- Sharon Thesen
- Barry McKinnon
- Cedar Sigo
- George Stanley
- Robin Blaser
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