We had a full house for the Flag Day 2026 online workshop for poets interested in making the most out of the summer Poetry Postcard Fest and the end of fest daysong, day-long writing ritual. We played a bit of a 2001 interview with Jerome Rothenberg discussing his The Lorca Variations and the practice of stealing nouns from other poets as an example of “othering” or bring other selves into the poem as it’s being composed.

My notes for the workshop:

Postcarding and DaySinging Workshop
June 14, 2026

Thank you for registering for this workshop. Your contributions allow the continued operation of the Cascadia Poetics Lab which is undergoing a restructuring of operations in 2026 in order to better operate in the future, so every dollar helps more than you can imagine. You should have a book of poems by a poet you admire handy for this workshop.

& if you get something out of today’s workshop, I’ll be offering 3 five week workshops starting in fall called Poetry as Neuro-Resilience. October/November, January/February and April/May.

The Poetry Postcard Fest begins its 20th season July 4, 2026. For many of us who have been participating in this self-guided poetry workshop, summer means postcard poems and we prepare all year by buying postcards and collage materials, and clearing the social calendar enough for us to fulfill our promise to send out at least 31 original poems written on postcards before August 31. Postcard season is a time of year akin to the holiday season or spring.

In 2022, inspired by Pierre Joris and Bernadette Mayer, I created an exercise for our online workshop participants called the DaySong.

In our workshop, I’ll go over some methods one can use for postcards and for DaySongs. The daily writing (or almost daily writing) of postcards is essential for the best DaySong results. Daily journal writing is also helpful and if you have not done Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way I highly recommend it.

Fest basics. Address validation.
Spontaneous composition.
Epistolary Poetry. (Sam’s essay.)
First Thought/Best Thought.
Seriality, T. Clear, Zach Charles as examples.

Let’s do introductions and then I will offer a writing exercise. You do not have to share what you write today, unless you want to. In the chat, please tell us who you are, where you are from and what you are hoping to get out of this experience.

I N T R O D U C T I O N S

https://paulenelson.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Pre-Labor-Day-DaySong-Poets-Subject-is-Time-.pdf

I went back to my blogpost Notes on Gone South about a chapbook Barry McKinnon sent me and was reminded of this quote, which I never forgot:

The composing principle for “Arrhythmia”, and I hope all of my work, was in line with W.C. Williams’ dictum that each poem must sum up the poet’s life to that point. I wrote “Arrhythmia” daily with the sense that if I had
anything more to say I’d better get at it. If the word “subject” is still in the post-modern lexicon, I believe the poet’s subject is time – and that language discloses the actualities therein. Emotion is the poem’s fact.

Personal Mythology, Dharma Position. Antidotes to poetry A.I. can write.

Cascadian Zen Variations
(Homage to Rothenberg)

The work of the late poet, translator and anthologist Jerome Rothenberg is poised to last many decades, perhaps centuries, after his April 21, 2024 death in California.

When he traveled to Auburn, Washington to read and give a workshop at the original SPLAB (Northwest Spokenword Lab) his latest book was The Lorca Variations. In the interview conducted in November 2001 about the process which led to The Lorca Variations, Rothenberg said:

Rothenberg interview part 2, cue to 1:38: https://paulenelson.com/2013/01/18/jerome-rothenberg-nov-2001-interview/

JR: I entered into a process of writing in which I went back to a number of the poems in [Lorca’s] Suites, and with each poem I extracted all of the English nouns. In other words, this is my translation, and although it’s Lorca’s poems to start with, the words are words of our language or words that I selected as the poet translator. And I set the words up in columns and moved among the columns, picking out the words, all of the nouns in the Lorca poems, and sometimes in a very systematic way, sometimes in a very free way. But in each poem to have all of Lorca’s nouns attended to. And poems emerged that on the one hand were very different, and on the other hand, were clearly Lorca. It was a step for me beyond translation. It’s not paraphrased. It’s really a way of creating new poems based on the gathering of words from the other poet and the result was a book of 33 poems plus one – 34 poems I called The Lorca Variations.

PEN: The key word, I guess, is “other” and when we look at the stance toward poetry that many in the avant-garde of the Twentieth Century take, as opposed to the mainstream, there’s less of an ego involved and more of a poet as medium, or at least a poet as person who allows other voices into the poem, chance operations. And you used the phrase “othering” during your workshop…Why don’t you tell us about this notion of “othering” and the notion of trying to, as Olson said, “Rid yourself of the lyrical interference of the ego.

JR: Well, because we all carry our egos with us so, it is perhaps a vain ambition to think that you’re going to rid yourself of ego. But lyrical interference, I mean, the lyric is taken, if we take it not in the sense of song, but in the sense of a first person poetry, a most subjective form of poetry. Ultimately, this has its limitations. It throws the poet back on himself, herself and that’s OK, but it also narrows down the field of poetry. And when we imagine ourselves to be part of a lineage going back to a Homer, or a Dante, or a Shakespeare, poetry is a big proposition there. Partly it’s big because, Dante, Shakespeare and Homer, worked extensively and these were larger works. But even the possibility that in the shorter work, the short poem then, the medium-size poem, that there would be room for more than that kind of vaunted self-expression. The possibility of being able to express other selves, selves other than me, that the poet can be a spokesman for others and bear witness in the name of others. And this has been an ambition of poetry and let’s say, poets in America, going back to the time of the great founding poet, Walt Whitman, who in the great poem cryptically called Song of Myself, attempted to bring all possible selves into the poem: “for everything belonging to me, as well belongs to you,” he said.

PEN: “Voices of the diseased and …and so on and so forth…”

JR: Yeah. Also, the long suppressed. “Through me, many long suppressed voices,” Whitman says. And that has, for years been uppermost in my mind. And so techniques of poetry, collage, appropriation, chance operations, and the kind of variations that I’m speaking about, have seemed to me to be, not just ways of playing around with language, but ways of “othering,” of bringing the voices of others into the poem. And in that sense, also, not just to establish identity, but in a way, to put identity into question…

Here’s a chance for you to extract nouns from a book of your choice. For example, poets in Cascadian Zen Volume I, Empty Bowl basket.

Start with a spread sheet.
Or index cards.
Or a pocket journal. (Do you carry one around?)
Or your phone. (Do you text to yourself, or your email address?)

Maybe you will have read so much Sam Hamill that you can start to get into his head and maybe something Sam-ish comes out. This would be a form of othering. Maybe you get that electric feeling Eileen Myles described as “erotic, oddly / magnetic” and can write thru the styles of several of the poets of this basket. Maybe you have a better idea, doing a different poet, such as Lorca, or Bernadette Mayer or someone else near and dear to your heart, or just someone whose work you want a deeper engagement with.

Your task is to write a poem, or several, that provide an other perspective on whatever poet you choose by harvesting nouns that you normally would not use, from the other poet’s text. Write in such a way that the language is something that is using you, as Duncan said: “I don’t use language, I cooperate with it.”

Participants are given 10 minutes to write a postcard poem and allow for 2-3 folks to share their poems before moving on…

Day Song as Vision Quest

The Day Song, a poem written in a 24 hour period (or the 16 or so hours you’re awake during a 24 hour period) was originally envisioned as an attempt to broaden the compositional range of the postcard poet, from the 12-14 lines that can fit onto a postcard to the 10-119 pages that can be written in a day. (119 if you’re Bernadette Mayer writing Midwinter Day.) The exercise was offered to participants in the Life as Rehearsal for the Poem workshop and then to participants in the 2022 Poetry Postcard Fest. See:

https://paulenelson.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Inside-the-Day-Song-The-Temporal-Epic-.pdf

The second Day Song writing exercise happened on February 18, 2023 and the handout for that event is here:

https://paulenelson.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/Anno-Uno-Die-aut-septem.pdf

We plan the next such exercise August 30, 2026, but it can be conducted at any time convenient for the poet attempting such a project. (It is preferred to have solitude for the whole day, so one can harvest dreams and not have the fear of being interrupted. This may require sending a spouse away for 40 hours or so, or going on a writing retreat, though it has been my experience that proximity to one’s books comes in handy and also being in a place where the muse knows where to find you.) In my own experiences, deaths of friends helped propel the content of each Day Song I have so far attempted. Having a historical year as organizing principle was very helpful in the Anno Uno Die Aut Septem version. Having 31 original postcard poems handy to graft from is also helpful when inspiration runs dry, as it can when you are trying to write a Day Song. It also helps to prepare months in advance for such an occasion, as Bernadette Mayer did for her poem, and you might want to consider relating current events happening on the day of writing as Pierre Joris did in his…

What do you notice about these two writing projects?