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.
Sam @ 70
When I started getting more interested in poetry, early 90s (which does not seem like such a long time ago) I'd heard rumors about this curmudgeon in the Seattle poetry community. He was gruff, but...
Socialize Facebook
As I write this, the founder of Facebook is apologizing to the U.S. Congress for the data breach that is being referred to as the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Not only has the confidential personal...
Rob Lewis and The Silence of Vanishing Things
Is a planetary ecological collapse underway? Yep. Does anyone care? At least Rob Lewis does. He wrote a book of poems and essays about the climate crisis and suggests that a shift away from...
Some End/West Broadway Bowering/Stanley Book Launch
I got this in the mail last week from New Star Books of Vancouver, BC: Actually, it was addressed from Point Roberts, WA, a little strip of land, a peninsula actually, south of the 49th parallel,...
Bay Area Postcard Readings!
The launch of 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards, an anthology that was ten years in the making is finally happening in the Bay Area THIS WEEKEND! Ina Roy-Faderman has worked tirelessly to help...
Ellensburg Poetry Prowl
I am delighted to be part of the Ellensburg Poetry Prowl, April 7, 2018, in downtown Goatburg. (Does anyone call it that anymore?) A tribute to Langston Hughes, there are three days of events, but...
Lewis MacAdams Interview
In the effort to catalog all the programs done during the days in which I syndicated a weekly public affairs radio program, the latest gem I have re-discovered is a 2001 interview with poet Lewis...
C&P March 14 w/ John Olson
A participant in an open mic recently mentioned how important such spaces are now in our culture, with such political unrest and division. She could have also mentioned the ecological crisis we're...
Ellensburg Poetry Prowl, Postcards in Bay Area
Upcoming gig alert! 11am, March 24, 2018: Book Passage, Ferry Building, San Francisco, CA. Join us for a celebration of the publication of 56 Days of August (Five Oaks Press) – readers will include...
I Sing the Salmon Home
I'm delighted to have work in the new anthology curated by the outgoing Washington Poet Laureate Rena Priest. A postcard poem from 2022 was selected and I got this note from the publisher, Empty...
AWP Off-Site Readings
AWP is again having their annual convention in Seattle in 2023 and an expected 10,000 writers are headed here. (Don't say we didn't warn you!) The Cascadia Poetics Lab will have a booth at the book...
Acrostic for Halstein Stralberg
One of my greatest mentors in the Subud community, Halstein Stralberg, died on November 6, 2022 and was memorialized in Seattle at the Subud House/Spring Street Center on Sunday, January 22, 2023. I...
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.