Thanks to poetry hermano Raul Sanchez, I’ll be facilitating my Poetics as Cosmology this summer in the North Cascades and you are welcome to hang out. The place is Holden Village. “Over the course of more than 60 years, Holden Village has been transformed from a copper mining town to a vibrant place of education, programming, and worship where everyone is welcome and embraced, regardless of race, ethnicity, religious background, gender identity, sexual orientation, and ability.”

The week I will be facilitating is July 22-25, 2024, and registration is open now at this link: https://www.holdenvillage.org/visit/ For low income folks, there is financial assistance and I have 2 to 3 spots open in my car. Here is what I am planning:

I will facilitate a lively course designed to help participants tap into deeper levels of knowing to begin to inform their non-writing life & reduce reliance on editing. Some theory to understand the poetics of 20th/21st c approaches to spontaneous composition, some writing exercises, discussion, daily spiritual ecology field work & between class homework.

How does one’s own “stance toward reality” shape one’s art and, ideally, one’s life. Spontaneous poetry composition methods (the received poem) have existed since near the beginning of the use of the English language and approaches to this method have been articulated (& practiced) by legendary poets such as Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Wanda Coleman, Brenda Hillman, Nate Mackey, Eileen Myles and many others. The course will feature daily writing and reading exercises, spiritual ecology field work as well as a daily meeting to review materials and discuss how participants can learn to trust their first impulse and begin to deepen the connection between the local self and the noble/divine/higher Self.

David Abram notes: “that mind is not at all a human possession, but is rather a property of the earthly biosphere — a property in which we, along with the other animals and the plants, all participate. The apparent interiority that we ascribe to the mind would then have less to do with the notion that there is a separate mind located inside me, and another, distinct mind that resides inside you, and more to do with a sense that you and I are both situated inside it…”

Writing exercises designed to liberate a “first thought/best thought” approach, developed over 28 years, along with class discussion and field work will allow participants a sense of how to tap in to the larger sense of mind at play Abram describes. Ideally this course will allow participants an experience that transcends the human ego, allows them to write from the depth of personal mythology and train one’s self to think in specific luminous details to create original poems that begin to allow them to see and develop a poetics (stance toward poem-making) that aligns with a cosmology, or understanding of how we exist in and engage the universe.

I’d love to see you there and I am honored to be able to facilitate this workshop in such an amazing setting.