THE POETRY LAB PRESENTS4-Weeks on Hooks, Heartbeat, and Heat
Thursday, June 11 - July 2
4:30pm PT - 6:30pm PT
via Zoom
What happens when a pop song becomes a poem?
In this 4-week generative writing course, we’ll explore the relationship between poetry and pop music through themes of identity, nostalgia, rhythm, obsession, memory, and emotional intensity. Together, we’ll read contemporary poems inspired by music while listening closely to the songs, sounds, and emotional architectures that shaped them.
This course invites writers to treat pop culture not as a guilty pleasure, but as serious artistic material.
Throughout the course, students will read and discuss poems by writers including Barbara Jane Reyes, Rosebud Ben-Oni, Brenda Shaughnessy, and Emily Jungmin Yoon alongside contemporary pop songs and musical influences that help illuminate the work.
Together, we’ll explore how poets use:
Repetition and refrain
Persona and performance
Vulnerability and confession
Nostalgia and memory
Pop culture references
Musicality and rhythm
Emotional immediacy on the page
Each class session includes discussion, listening, generative writing prompts, and dedicated writing time so students can begin drafting and developing their own pop-influenced poems in real time.
Students will also have opportunities to share work in a supportive, community-centered environment focused on experimentation and discovery.
Class begins Thursday, June 11
and continues live June 18, 25, and July 2
All sessions are held via Zoom Classroom from 4:30pm PT - 6:30pm PT.
What’s It Like in Class?
This is not a passive Zoom seminar or a pre-recorded lecture. Our classes are live, interactive, and community-centered, with a real instructor and real writers gathering together each week to create, discuss, and explore poetry in real time.
Students are encouraged to ask questions, participate in discussion, share work, and engage with the material at whatever level feels comfortable to them. The atmosphere is supportive, thoughtful, and creatively energized. You do not need to have all the answers before arriving. You just need curiosity, openness, and a willingness to write.
4-Week Course
June 11 - July 2
Meets Thursdays 4:30pm - 6:30pm PT (Pacific Time Zone)
Pop music already understands hooks, heartbeats, and heat — the tension, repetition, vulnerability, and emotional release that make both songs and poems unforgettable. This class helps writers transform the music, memories, obsessions, and lyrics they already love into powerful new poetry in a live, highly generative creative space.
Member rates are available exclusively to active Lab Partner Members. Registrations made without an active membership may be subject to cancellation.
4-Week Course
We offer flexible, no-fee installment plans to make enrollment more accessible.
2 Payments of $78 one month apart
Class is June 11 - July 2
Meets Thursdays 4:30pm - 6:30pm PT (Pacific Time Zone)
Pop music already understands hooks, heartbeats, and heat — the tension, repetition, vulnerability, and emotional release that make both songs and poems unforgettable. This class helps writers transform the music, memories, obsessions, and lyrics they already love into powerful new poetry in a live, highly generative creative space.
Member rates are available exclusively to active Lab Partner Members. Registrations made without an active membership may be subject to cancellation.
4-Week Course
We offer flexible, no-fee installment plans to make enrollment more accessible.
3 Payments of $52 every 2 weeks
Class is June 11 - July 2
Meets Thursdays 4:30pm - 6:30pm PT (Pacific Time Zone)
Pop music already understands hooks, heartbeats, and heat — the tension, repetition, vulnerability, and emotional release that make both songs and poems unforgettable. This class helps writers transform the music, memories, obsessions, and lyrics they already love into powerful new poetry in a live, highly generative creative space.
Member rates are available exclusively to active Lab Partner Members. Registrations made without an active membership may be subject to cancellation.
One BIPOC Scholarship is available for this course. Apply for the Seat Here.
Lab Partners is The Poetry Lab’s membership program for writers who want to stay connected to a consistent creative practice throughout the year. More than a discount program, Lab Partners is designed to support the long arc of a writing life through accessible workshops, deeper educational opportunities, and an ongoing sense of community.
As a Lab Partner, you’ll receive:
Free enrollment in our monthly BrainTrust generative workshops
Reduced enrollment rates across many of our courses and programs (Enroll as a Member!)
Significant savings on premium offerings like the Feedback Circle
Access to exclusive member communications, opportunities, and announcements
A direct way to stay engaged with The Poetry Lab’s evolving educational ecosystem year-round
Lab Partners is ideal for writers who know they want to keep showing up to the page, whether through monthly workshops, multi-week courses, critique spaces, or independent creative practice.
Membership also directly supports our mission to keep poetry education accessible through sliding-scale programming, financial aid opportunities, and sustainable compensation for teaching artists. There’s no minimum committment. You can cancel anytime.
This is not just a membership. A writing life. 🌿
Why Become a Member?
Your course enrollment gives you four weeks of creative momentum. Membership helps you sustain it.
When you become a Lab Partner Member alongside your course registration, you also unlock automatic access to The BrainTrust, our monthly live generative writing workshop built to keep your creative practice active year-round. Each BrainTrust session is a standalone creative experience centered on a unique craft theme, poetic technique, or experimental prompt structure designed to help writers generate fresh work in an energized, low-pressure environment.
In other words: the course gives you depth. Membership gives you continuity.
Many students leave a class energized and inspired, only to struggle maintaining momentum afterward. The BrainTrust helps bridge that gap by giving you a consistent creative space to return to each month alongside a community of serious, curious writers who are actively making new work too.
If you’re already investing in your writing practice through a course, membership helps turn that momentum into an ongoing creative rhythm instead of a one-time experience.
Plus! As a Member, you’ll save $50 off every course and $70 off of The Feedback Circle!
Membership is month-to-month with no long-term commitment, and you can cancel anytime directly through your account settings.
Asela Lee Kemper is an East Asian American poet and writer based in Southern Oregon.
Throughout her writing, Asela plays around with how she views poetry. Over the years, she navigates identity, friendships, family matters, and self-love by experimenting poetic forms with nostalgic memories and mediums such as songs, movies, TV shows, and mangas where she found solace.
With practicing her craft in poetry, Asela embraces the balance between finding restrain & control by writing in forms and, what one can describe, subtle chaotic energy filled with vibrant yet emotional language on grief and identity.
She graduated with a MFA in Creative Writing with emphasis in Poetry at Pacific Northwest College of Art to continue editorial and educational work for poetry. She has experience facilitating and leading poetry workshops with PNCA, Poetry Orchard, Abode Press, Sampaguita Press, and Variety Pack Magazine. She hopes to expand her love for poetry to genres such as translations, graphic novels (or mangas) and novel-in-verse.
She is a poetry editor at Variety Pack Magazine and has previously worked with presses and journals including Timberline Review and Copper Canyon Press. She also has published works in Silk Club: QUIET, Mag 20/20, ACE SPACE LDN Zine, and the anthology No Tender Fences. She is the author of the digital chapbook Cherry Blossom Festival and audio microchapbook Finally: The Mixtape. Her debut poetry collection that centers around the theme of nostalgia with Gnashing Teeth Publishing in 2027.
You can find Asela on Twitter (or how she refers to it as the dead bird app) @AselaLeeK, on Instagram @thesakuraink, and on Substack at aselawhowrites.substack.com