Daysong Workshops 2026
Daysong Workshops
Two versions of what will be basically the same workshop to discuss the concept of the daysong, how to accomplish one and what it means to the poet who pulls it off.
Thursday, January 22, 2026 3-5 PM PDT
Sunday, January 25, 2026 3-5 PM PDT
Workshop Cost: Free, with optional donation of $20-$100.00
Paul E Nelson
Founder of the Cascadia Poetics LAB and the Cascadia Poetry Festival, Paul was a professional broadcaster from 1980 to 2006, and researched, hosted and produced over 450 original public affairs radio programs (1993-2004) and over 300 additional interviews since then. On-air host, news anchor, and public affairs coordinator in Chicago, Seattle, Baltimore and other towns, he’s a poet who has given presentations or readings in Brussels, London, China, Los Angeles, and other places while being very active since 1994 in the Puget Sound literary community. Published books include: Haibun de la Serna (Goldfish Press, Seattle, 2022), American Prophets (Interviews, Seattle Poetics LAB, 2018) American Sentences (Apprentice House, 2015, 2nd edition 2021), A Time Before Slaughter (Apprentice House, Nov. 2009, shortlisted for the Stranger Genius Award in 2010), and the second edition including Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia (2020), Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies, published in English and Portuguese by Lumme Editions of Brazil in 2013 and Organic Poetry (VDM, Verlag, Germany, October 2008). His 2015 interview with José Kozer was published in 2016 as Tiovivo Tres Amigos. He is also co-editor of four anthologies: Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia, Samthology: A Tribute to Sam Hamill (Seattle Poetics LAB, 2019), Make it True meets Medusario (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2019) and 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards. He writes an American Sentence every day and lives with his wife Bhakti Watts and youngest daughter Ella Roque in Seattle’s Rainier Beach neighborhood in the dəxʷwuqʷad Creek/Cedar River watershed in the Cascadia bioregion. He serves as the Literary Executor for Sam Hamill. In late 2022 he released a chapbook The Day Song of Casa del Colibrí and in Spring 2023 released a chapbook entitled: Another Day Song (1980).
Daysong Workshops
Introduction to the DaySong Workshop
There will be two daysong workshops in January to support poets who seek to make the writing of a day long poem a vision quest in language. We recommend Imbolc, February 1, 2026, to attempt this feat. The occasion is also known as Saint Brigid’s Day in honor of the patroness of poetry, learning, healing & protection, among other things. Fire is a vital part of this celebration. Plan to be alone that day (all day) for best results. From the introduction to my upcoming book of DaySongs, there is:
In her introduction to The New Long Poem Anthology, Sharon Thesen writes a few things that exemplify the daysong. One is,
Long poems belong to the practice and definition of what Ezra Pound called the “prose tradition” in poetry; that is, their tendency to a narrative sense of the passage of time drives them by and into history beyond the capacities and preoccupations of the lyric. The long poem in Canada is often a way of handling that distrust of the “poetic” associated with the lyric voice, seen as a falseness, a colonizing wish overlaid upon the real…
Thesen also quotes Robert Kroetsch’s essay “For Play and Entrance”: “In love-making, in writing the long poem — delay is both technique and content” as well as Fred Wah’s notion of “the forces that keep long poems going on, including the looping ways in which they pause in order to continue.” The poetic diary or utaniki is also referenced in her introduction, a “long poem sensibility…[that] tracks a section of a writer’s life as a discontinous yet continuing story of consciousness. It avoids the demands of an autobio-graphical rationalization by a process of estrangement: the poet is, after all, frequently on a journey to “far towns,” as Basho had it.” to the Narrow Road to the Interior as Sam Hamill put it.
Materials on the daysong “form”, techniques for writing all day and practices to prepare a poet for such an occasion will be offered.
This workshop is being offered as a gift from the Cascadia Poetics Lab to anyone interested in it, but a limit of 15 for each iteration will be maintained. As such, the first 30 registrants who make a contribution via our registration platform will participate. It is a benefit for the work of CPL and exemplifies our commitment to our unique stance toward poem-making.
Course Materials
(Thursday, January 22, 2026 3-5PM PDT)
(sUNday, January 25, 2026 3-5PM PDT)
Take a look at: https://paulenelson.com/daysong/