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.
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...
Andrew Schelling in Cascadia
In the process of organizing the audio archives of SPLAB, (thank you 4Culture) and those that pre-date the December 13, 1993 founding of the non-profit organization, I came across the audio of Anne...
Choral Poetry – Jack and Adelle Foley
Jack and Adelle Foley are poets from Oakland, California, who performed at the 3rd annual Super Bowl of Poetry at the Northwest SPokenword LAB in Auburn, Washington, in February 2000. It was one of...
Charles Potts Interview
A 2017 interview conducted with Charles Potts by your humble narrator has been published online by Rain Taxi: https://www.raintaxi.com/a-path-through-the-wilderness-an-interview-with-charles-potts/ ...
Claudia Castro Luna Interview, Part 2
Last week we featured the first half of our interview your humble narrator conducted with the incoming Washington State Poet Laureate, Claudia Castro Luna. In the second half (audio parts 3 & 4)...
Claudia Castro Luna Interview, Part 1
Claudia Castro Luna is the incoming Poet Laureate of the state of Washington. For two years she had been the Civic Poet of Seattle, the city’s version of the ceremonial position. In this first part...
Cascadia Talk in Nanaimo, Retreat
It's been over five years since I published Why Cascadia, Why Poetry? In it I make the case for bioregionalism and poetry as part of a response to the decline of democracy in the United States,...
Audio Interview Archive Taking Shape
Thanks to a grant from 4Culture, the archive of interviews I have done over the years is being organized. Summaries of past interviews, going back to December 1990, are going up weekly...
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...
Shuri Kido Interview
What a blessing it was December 28, 2022, to interview Shuri Kido, the accomplished Japanese poet and Zen practitioner. As I told he and his translators (Tomoyuki Endo, Forrest Gander) on that...
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.