Thanks to the efforts of my publisher Koon Woon and Goldfish Press, I have been awarded a grant from Poets & Writers to facilitate a poetry workshop Friday, April 15 from 1- 3 pm at the Alaska House Apartments community room in West Seattle.

My topic will be Poetics as Cosmology, the same topic I’ll be discussing on Monday, March 21 at Cal State L.A. This is really the overarching theme of my study of poetry over the last 30 years. Each time I talk about it, I try to suss what is in the hearts of the gathered, what their needs are, and tailor the talk accordingly. Of course Charles Olson, Denise Levertov, Michael McClure, Sam Hamill, Robert Duncan, Joanne Kyger, Diane di Prima and more contemporary poets are the focus and how they lived lives dedicated to poetry. Poetry is a way of knowing that should be considered equal to sociology, philosophy, science, spirituality and other ways of knowing the world and our place in it. To have a poetics that are a cosmology, one must learn to make a poem like we make a life and improvisation, living in the moment and being connected to place are essential ingredients.

This workshop is free, but preregistration is required and you can email or call me if you would like one of the two slots still available. There will be some writing exercises, some audio of interviews and discussion. Thank you Terran Campbell, Denny Stern and Dianne Knox for singing up. I look forward to meeting Koon Woon’s circle.

Koon Woon has been a joy to work with. The founder of Goldfish Press, which has published my latest book Haibun de la Serna, he is an important poet and part of Seattle’s literary community and I am grateful he is my publisher.

I have some lovely testimonials here: https://paulenelson.com/testimonials/

and will be reading poems with the Jim O’Halloran Trio Friday, February 25 at 6pm at Kezira in Columbia City.