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.
527. Choose Your Pronoun
The latest poem to be posted from the 2015 August Poetry Postcard Fest:
Bioregional Cultural Investigation
We do what we know before we know what we do. - Charles Olson. Little did I know in 2012 that the first Cascadia Poetry Festival would be the start of a 20 year bioregional cultural investigation...
Seattle Not So Great
Great article by Danny Westneat (former Valley Daily News columnist) about whether Seattle is great. In the article, he refers to an Atlantic magazine article entitled: Eleven Signs a City Will...
Beached America (Bob Koehler)
Bob Koehler is a Chicago-based Peace Journalist who has written an op-ed for Buzzflash at Truthout entitled: "When a Nation Has Lost Its Soul, Its Politics Become a Tacky TV Performance." Koehler's...
526. Fennelity
Unlike Chicory, I’ve been eating fennel the last couple of summers. The intensity of this herb is astounding and a wonderful taste that one gets in Cascadia summer. I heard it grows wild north of...
AG/BS Wait Till I’m Dead
An East Coast Jewish Democratic Socialist is running for President of the U.S. and it would make sense that there is a connection with Allen Ginsberg, who died in 1997 and who I interviewed in 1994....
1992 Peter Berg Interview
I was a rookie interviewer in 1992, when I had the good fortune to be able to interview Peter Berg of the Planet Drum Foundation about the concept of bioregionalism. When I listen back to the audio,...
525. Momentary Cultivation
An August Poetry Postcard from 2015 featuring yet another photo of mine from 2014, this one from the Skokomish Rez, I love the allusion to the American Indian Movement and hope President Obama will...
HRC and the Death of the Onion
I've loved the Onion for years and can remember almost wetting myself at the biting humor of some of the stories. (One on Ozzie Guillen comes to mind.) Dark, un-PC and probably the best thing going...
Beat Breath for EBSN
I am delighted to continue my association with the European Beat Studies Network again this Sunday, as part of their 2021 Zoom conference. I am also delighted to present on the topic of Beat Breath...
Seriality (A 2022 Workshop:
In this workshop we take the methods and the organismic stance toward poetics (& life) and continue to investigate how to deepen one’s own work and life through spontaneous writing, rituals,...
Notes for American Sentences Talk to Haiku Koma Kulshan
Thanks to C.J. Prince and John Green of Haiku Koma Kulshan, I was invited to give a talk about American Sentences on Saturday, October 9, 2021 via Zoom to their Haiku group. I was given some topics...
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.