2026 Cascadia Poetry Festival 10 – Seattle Workshops

Startling the Poem Awake

Tess Gallagher

Friday, October 9

Rainier Beach Community Club

In my poems I have recently been working with breaking out of the well-mannered stasis poems can fall into. I try to do so while still holding credibility and at the same time discovering a sudden fresh leap the poem can make.

If this “startling action” happens mid-poem you must continue the poem which feels a little harder to me, but the awakening action mid-poem can really re-energize the poem.

Sometimes this “startling action” can come at the very end of the poem which re-infuses the entire poem and makes one want to immediately reread it, because that ending asks that you re-encounter the poem in order to compass what it’s causing you to feel in its final moments.

As we draft our poems, I will give examples of what I’m talking about, using sample poems from my own work and those of others.

The objective is to challenge yourself to keep the poem as vital and alive as you can. Once you try this “awakening” notion as a strategy it can enliven your “way” in your poems with a will to astonish and jolt your imagination and your readers’ imaginations onto unexpectedly fertile ground.

Concerning Work and Poetry (of Course the Mundane is Generative!)”

Gary Copeland Lilley

Friday, October 9, 2PM

Rainier Beach Community Club

A great many of us are descendants from families whose people had jobs, the laborers. We’ve worked the farms, the diners, the gas stations, the factories, and the homes, just to name a few of those occupations. In the work of creating narratives within the frame of poems, stories, and spoken-word ballads, the choices of mundane details can provide surprisingly powerful understatements;  the character speech, the diction and syntax of that created individual’s unique voice is regional and the tone reveals a self-perception of the speaker within the narrative of ordinary days, the nothing-specials of the work week. I’ve included one of my short poems, “Riding with the Dragon,” as an example. The task is to create a list of mundane things, that someone in your family might have done or will do (yeah, it doesn’t necessarily have to be factual). Now, write your first draft of 150-200 words. Don’t worry, your revisions will come later. The point is to take your first draft home.

Riding With the Dragon

Every 15 minutes a cigarette fliesfrom the cab,
sparking in the night air stream
on the driver side of the rig. I’m in the shotgun seat
of a Freightliner diesel. Console between us,
the eight-track and a stack of maps, a spilled
carton of Marlboros, one half-empty pack.
I check my old man’s profile in the approaching lights,
the sag the sag in his face, an oilstained ballcap,
the red tip of a cigarette pulling toward his mouth
as he runs the road with his window down.
His left hand on the wheel, right on the stick,
he can drive this steel in his sleep.