About the Workshop

What happens when the imagination stops behaving, or when it behaves too well? This workshop approaches the imagination not as a single, mystical reservoir but as a constellation of practices—form, structure, perception, memory, dream—each a room the poet can enter, rearrange, and rebuild. Over five days we’ll study how poets make imaginative leaps and how those leaps reshape the meaning and momentum of a poem. We’ll read widely: poems that fracture reality, poems that reassemble it, and poems that use the imaginative act to clarify what the world tries to obscure.

Each day will begin with a brief craft talk and close reading before moving into generative exercises that invite participants to stretch their imaginative habits and test new modes of making. We’ll explore strategies such as:

• Transformative Seeing (how perception becomes invention)
• Reframing the Real (turning fact into imaginative structure)
• The Leap and the Lateral Move (how poems travel without losing their center of gravity)
• Disruption as Possibility (productive estrangement and the unexpected image)
• Imagination as Revision (the imaginative life of a poem after its first draft)

By the end of the week, participants will have produced new work, reimagined existing drafts, and developed a personal imaginative practice to carry beyond Provincetown—one that continues to open new doors long after the workshop concludes.

About the Instructor

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author, most recently, of Silver. A recipient of a 2025 Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, he divides his time between New York and Barcelona.