Paul E Nelson presenting at Cascadia Poetry Festival 8, photo by Leszek Chudzinski
Paul Nelson’s ongoing honing of the Day Song poetry event has produced some of the most lively and consequential verse of our time. How else write about the calamities and demands and mental/emotional/political consequences of the materialist apocalypse upon us, than an ongoing poesis of awareness and participation the anti-form the Day Song provides? Truly a praxis of proprioception and of Olson’s demand to “keep it moving…
– Sharon Thesen, Cascadian Poet/Scholar from B.C.
R.I.P. Michael McClure, 20-Oct-1932 – 4-May-2020
I will never forget meeting Michael McClure, interviewing him in 1995 at the old KZOK-FM studios on Queen Anne Hill, him taking me out for Vietnamese food saying lunch was "on Penguin" (his...
PEN America Emergency Writers Fund
Artists have to train themselves to not link their own self-esteem to outside validation. In THIS culture, the job is much harder because of what the composer Charles Wuorinen said to the New York...
Sam Green’s ATBS Binding
Huge gratitude goes out to Washington's first Poet Laureate, Sam Green, who has bound my new book A Time Before Slaughter/Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia. He did it a week or so ago and sent...
Lewis MacAdams Dead
This was in the L.A. Times tonight: Lewis MacAdams, a poet and crusader for restoring the concrete Los Angeles River to a more natural state and co-founder of one of the most influential...
Documenting Pandemic
Thanks to POPO participant Linda Clifton, I learned about an essay by George Saunders in The New Yorker: A key paragraph for me: Are you keeping records of the e-mails and texts you’re getting, the...
A Time Before Slaughter/Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia
When the box of books arrives at your house and for the first time you hold your new book in your hand, it is quite an experience. I remember moving to Seattle in 2009 and having the first box of my...
POPO is Here (Early)
Faced with the prospect of not having any (in person) poetry readings for a while due to the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) and self-isolation for several weeks, the SPLAB Board agreed with my notion...
(Streaming) Lyric World Conversations with Koon Woon
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED DUE TO THE CURRENT COVID-19 PANDEMIC I was delighted to be part of an event that features a local poet who has been part of the Seattle literary scene for many years and...
Plugging Into the Current: The Immediacies of Daphne Marlatt’s Writing
I had a flurry of activity about a month ago. I prepared a talk for a poet's society with which I was engaged for a couple of months to serve as a sort of "dress rehearsal" for a talk at a...
Postcards from Here, Postcards from Mapes Creek
I had no idea when Bhakti Watts and I moved to Rainier Beach in 2017 how much we would love this neighborhood, how much it would give back to us and shape our lives. And yes, we've each survived...
A Journal of the Plague Years
I like to think of it as projective journalism. Maybe it's becoming a lost art to write and publish history with deep perception hours after events happen, but Susan Zakin and her crew at Journal of...
DaySong Miracle (Past 62) Profiled on SICA-USA
I was delighted to see the SICA-USA blog post written about my new book DaySong Miracle (Past 62). I knew it was coming, but to read the way my Subud brother Jim O'Halloran handled the information...
In Honor of David McCloskey “The Father of Cascadia”
David McCloskey passed away on July 3. In honor of his lifetime of work to create and spread a culture that was deeply connected to the Cascadian bioregion, Cascadian Prophets, which owes more than just its name to his work, we want to share this interview from October, 2013. Find it transcribed on our website.
To listen to the original audio of this interview, click here.
Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website.
In Honor of David McCloskey "The Father of Cascadia"
How does one make literary art about this time in history that avoids rhetoric and facile political positioning in this era of the spectacle? How does one avoid being consumed by the simultaneous collapse of so many systems — some being eviscerated by people in positions designed to protect such systems? Deborah Poe has some idea based on her submission to the upcoming anthology Winter in America (Still.
Deborah is the author of several books of poetry including keep, Elements, and Our Parenthetical Ontology, as well as a novella in verse, Hélène. Her visual works–video poems and handmade book objects–have been exhibited throughout the US. She lives on stolen Coast Salish land, specifically the ancestral homeland of the Duwamish, Suquamish, Stillaguamish, and Muckleshoot People.
Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website.
To get original poetry right in your mailbox this summer, check out the Poetry Postcard Fest.