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.
How to Survive Trump? (Cascadia Knute says)
Perhaps it's vindication for suggesting Bernie Sanders was a candidate more in line with traditional Democratic Party values, or the yuge desire to see an end...
Visiting Corita
I had a vague memory of the work of Sister Corita Kent when I saw the Portland Art Museum's exhibition of her work in August. The "Love Stamp" (back when stamps were .22c) did remind me that I'd...
Wanda Coleman @ 70
Wanda Coleman did not live to be 70, but today would have been her 70th birthday and as I go back to her work in preparation for a celebration of her memory at Beyond Baroque in L.A. today, I feel...
Footsteps Anthology Benefits Homeless Vets
Thanks to the tirelessness and vision of Doug Johnson, Footsteps, a poetry anthology to benefit Homeless Vets, which I co-edited, is being released tonight and there will be a candlelight vigil in...
Post-Election Blues
Two poems (or a poem and an excerpt) and a bunch of graphics come to mind today as I help friends deal with what they see as catastrophic election results. I am an optimistic person, so I can...
Post-Fest Thoughts
There are about a thousand things I could write about the recently concluded Cascadia Poetry Festival. That John Olson could step in with only a few hours notice to read on the Main Stage was a...
Poet Interviews
I am both excited and anxious about the 4th Cascadia Poetry Festival starting this Thursday (Nov 3, 2016) and concluding Sunday at 6pm. Working with a local organizing team, we've tried to put...
2 Anthologies: Footsteps & South Seattle Emerald
I am blessed to have work in TWO anthologies coming out in the next two weeks. The first is the South Seattle Emerald's Emerald Reflections: A South Seattle Emerald Anthology. It comes out of the...
Happy 69th Nate Mackey
Nate Mackey, born on this day in 1947, gets the Birthday Anagram Treatment. And do enjoy the interview we did in 2012. And this excerpt from an interview we did that was published in Amerarcana as...
Pierre Joris Interview (Canto Diurno #1, 2-MAY-2022)
It’s a pretty ambitious goal to write an epic poem in a day. Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, an epic about the daily routine written on Winter Solstice 1978, is like no other project that I know...
Full Earth Day Agenda
Cascadia Poetics Lab Board Member Jason Wirth and I are leading a clean-up of Chinook Beach Park on Friday, April 22 from 1-3pm. We will have some garbage bags and a couple of pickers, but feel free...
Hoa Nguyen Interview (A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure)
I had the good fortune to interview Hoa Nguyen on April 14, 2022 via Zoom about her book A Thousand Times You Lost Your Treasure. The video is embedded below. My post on the Cascadia Poetics Lab...
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.