I am delighted to participate in Cascadia: A Braided Land, at UBC Okanagan March 1 & 2. This event is the vision of Slava Bart, with assistance from Harold Rhenisch. Here is a description:

I met Slava Bart via Sharon Thesen. Slava is originally from Kazakhstan and lived for 30 years in Israel. He is an excellent poet and speaks at least five languages. He heard about the Cascadia movement in Israel, is interested in “post-national” nation movements and is a grad student at UBCO. On this event, he is working with Harold Rhenisch, a true Cascadian poet, whom I interviewed in December 2024. See: https://cascadiapoeticslab.org/2024/12/interview-with-harold-rhenisch-on-the-salmon-shanties-a-cascadian-song-cycle/

Slava has been an inspired participant in the Poetics as Cosmology workshop that ended two weeks ago.

I was asked to speak about something related to Cascadia and poetry and I am developing some notes on this subject:

Cascadian Mind and the Cascadian Saturation Job
(For Kelowna, BC, March 1 & 2, 2025)

How to allow one’s mind to be more of the place than of the intellect that has abstracted us from what is real and how to take the notion from Charles Olson of a “saturation job” to create a project centered around one event or events in the history of the bioregion and to write about them in a “use of speech at its least careless and least logical” in a way that Brenda Hillman describes as “experimental lyric form.” A note on lineation will be included.

I would love to see you in Kelowna in a couple of weeks. More of this post on my Substack.