POETICS Summer Workshop 2026

A five-session live workshop on the vocabulary of poetics, taught by Tamarah Rockwood, publisher of Bainbridge Island Press. Capped at twelve poets. Live on Zoom, Sept through Oct 2026.

Bainbridge Island Press has been named to Writer's Digest 101 Best Websites for Writers 2026, listed at the top of the Poetry section alongside Rattle and Poets.org.

Workshop overview

The POETICS Summer Workshop is a five-session craft and feedback workshop designed to give participants a working vocabulary for what they are already doing on the page. Across five sessions, participants will study twenty terms from the classical and contemporary craft tradition, applying each term to teaching poems in lecture and to their own drafts in workshop and feedback.

This is a live, generative workshop with a strict twelve-poet cap. It is not a self-paced course or a recorded lecture series. Every session meets in real time on Zoom for 120 minutes.

Session structure

Each 120-minute session is divided into three parts:

• 60 minutes of close lecture on four vocabulary terms, each anchored in a teaching poem. Lectures draw from the POETICS Substack essay archive.
• 30 minutes of small-group breakout in three Zoom rooms of four poets each, applying the session's vocabulary to a peer's submitted poem.
• 30 minutes of full-room discussion or open mic. Sessions 2 through 5 conclude with an open-mic half hour featuring three readers.

Cameras and microphones stay on. Participants who prefer not to read their work aloud may indicate this at registration and will not be called on to read.

Curriculum

• Session 1: The Four Master Tropes. Metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony. Burke's framework. Anchor poem: Keats, "Ode to a Nightingale."
• Session 2: Aristotelian Foundations. Mimesis, mythos, ethos, dianoia. Anchor poems: Williams, Browning, Roethke, Arnold.
• Session 3: Turning Points. Peripeteia, anagnorisis, hamartia, catharsis. Anchor poems: Heaney, Smith, Hayden, Olds.
• Session 4: Lyric Figures. Apostrophe, ekphrasis, volta, conceit. Anchor poems: Donne, Keats, Shakespeare, Glück.
• Session 5: Sonic and Structural. Enjambment, caesura, anaphora, refrain. Anchor poems: Neruda, Stallings, Whitman, Bishop.

One teaching poem per vocabulary term. A printable participant booklet is provided at registration.

Individual written feedback

Every participant receives individual written feedback on every submitted poem, returned by email before the following session. Starting in Session 2, participants submit one poem per session, due 48 hours before class. Across the five-session series, this amounts to forty-eight individual feedback letters from the instructor.

This component is the workshop's defining feature and the primary value of the tuition. Participants are not buying a lecture series. They are buying a five-session writing relationship with the instructor.

Workshop reading

All seven titles are stocked on the POETICS Bookstore Workshop shelf:

• Poetics by Aristotle
• A Poet's Glossary by Edward Hirsch
• All the Fun's in How You Say a Thing by Timothy Steele
• Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins
• The Wild Iris by Louise Glück
• Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith
• Like by A.E. Stallings

Schedule

All sessions live on Zoom, 5:00–7:00 PM Pacific:

• Session 1: Wednesday, Sept 9, 2026
• Session 2: Wednesday, Sept 16, 2026
• Session 3: Wednesday, Sept 23, 2026
• Session 4: Wednesday, Sept 30, 2026
• Session 5: Wednesday, Oct 7, 2026

Tuition

• $600 early registration through July
• $750 from Aug 1st, 2026 through start of class

A small number of reduced-fee scholarship spots are available. Send a brief note about your work and circumstances to hello@bainbridgeislandpress.com.

About the instructor

Tamarah Rockwood is the publisher of Bainbridge Island Press, host of the POETICS podcast, and Chair of Ars Poetica Western Washington, a fourteen-year-old grassroots program pairing poets and visual artists across the Kitsap Peninsula. She holds a master's degree from Harvard and is a PhD candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham, where her doctoral research is on the history of the exclamation mark in poetry. She has spent decades publishing indie poetry chapbooks and organizing creative literary events.

Who this workshop is for

This workshop is open to poets at all experience levels. The vocabulary studied is foundational to lyric poetry and is not reserved for academic readers. Participants who have been writing for years and want a shared craft vocabulary, participants who want individualized feedback from a working publisher and editor, and participants who are looking for a small, serious, live workshop community will all find the format suited to their needs.

Workshop policies

Participants must be 18 years of age or older. Sessions are not recorded; live attendance is expected. The twelve-poet cap will not be raised.