Daysong Workshops This Week!
Join us for online workshops focusing on the Daysong practice of writing a poem for an entire day this Thursday, January 22, and Sunday, January 25, both 3-5 PM PST. The two workshops will be similar with slight variations, so we invite you to choose the date that works best for you! Learn from Paul Nelson about the concept of the Daysong and how to accomplish it. Materials on the daysong “form,” techniques for writing all day and practices to prepare a poet for such an occasion will be offered. These workshops are FREE with an optional donation of $20-100 to support Cascadia Poetics Lab. CLICK HERE TO REGISTER.
About the Daysong
Paul E. Nelson has been practicing the Daysong for several years, citing Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day and Pierre Joris’ “Canto Diurno #1” as inspiration for the practice, both pieces having been written in a concentrated period of time. The Daysong was originally born from the workshops Life as Rehearsal for the Poem and Poetics as Cosmology, and is now considered a practice for participants of the Poetry Postcard Fest to transition into writing outside of the limited space of a postcard. There’s also a benefit for all poets and writers alike to put an entire day aside, free of distractions, to write. You can learn more in depth about the Daysong through Paul’s workshop handouts on the topic, Anno Uno Die Aut Septem, Inside the Day Song: The Temporal Epic and Daysong as Vision Quest.
You might get a draft of a manuscript or something you’d consider publishing after practicing the Daysong! Paul has published multiple of his Daysongs, including The Day Song of Casa del Colibrí and DaySong Miracle (Past 62), with his next Daysong book forthcoming. I interviewed Paul for Daysong Miracle (Past 62). Here is a piece from that interview on Paul’s Daysong technique for that year:
VM: The title of this year’s day song, DaySong Miracle (Past 62), includes your current age. Did you use this year’s Daysong in any way to utilize an exploration of this specific year and age for yourself? How does your own personal mythology play into this piece?
PEN: Yes. The poem is a look back at a year in which three friends died at age 62. That I was about to turn 62 made it eerie, but other than the coincidence of this situation, there is not much to it except to note that my longtime friends died in that 12-month span. My memories of seeing Al Dimeola, John McLaughlin and Paco DeLucia with two of the friends, John and Paul, both guitarists, was especially bittersweet, since I am the last of the three living and now the story is dependent on my telling of it… In my February 2023 Daysong, I tried to redistribute future and past events by writing about some of those experiences I had in my young manhood where I was tracking some very important and potent music. I used the poem as an aid to tweaking my own personal mythology to one that cut that kid some slack for also listening to some of the pop music of the day. Barry McKinnon told me something he said William Carlos Williams said and it was something like: “every poem you write should be a summation of your life up to that point.” He never told me the source of that quote, but it made total sense to me when he said it. This means that the poems one writes should always have that aspect of one’s deep self as part of the foundation of any poem one writes. This raises the stakes. It is for poets who see the act of having a poetry life as an effort to deepen one’s own individuation.
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