I had the good fortune to interview Bill Barillas on The North American Sequence of Theodore Roethke. Sam Hamill told me before he died that this sequence was the beginning of Cascadian poetry and I’ve seen nothing to counter that theory. Bill Barillas is the editor of “A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke.” He was kind enough to sit in the Zoom room February 3, 2026, to discuss the sequence, Sam’s theory and my interest. My introduction to the occasion went like this:

In the Foreward to the Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke, Edward Hirsch writes:

Theodore Roethke moved among the mysteries. He celebrated and moralized the American landscape, schooled his spirit in the greenhouse and the marshland, and transformed himself into a major Romantic poet. His work, which began in Michigan, ended up embracing all North America. He was a midcentury American poet, a key figure in the so-called Middle Generation, who worked himself free of the straitjacket of American poetry in the forties and fifties. He worked against the grain. It is a marvel how he managed to inherit and extend the Romantic tradition of W. B. Yeats, Wallace Stevens, and Hart Crane, and belongs to that visionary company.

Before his death Sam Hamill said that the poetry of the Cascadia bioregion began with The North American Sequence by Roethke, from his posthumous book: The Far Field. Bill Barillas is editor of A Field Guide to the Poetry of Theodore Roethke, author of The Midwestern Pastoral: Place and Landscape in Literature of the American Heartland, and serves on the board of The Friends of Roethke Foundation.