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.
G.P. Lainsbury’s Cascadia Transit
Greg (GP) Lainsbury, Professor in the English department at Northern Lights College, Fort St. John, BC is another of the poets with work published in Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia. On July 29,...
After the Japanese 87-90 (Mountains, Mingus & Madrones)
Taking the ferry in the Salish Sea, being on any kind of boat in the waters of Cascadia gives you quite a different perspective and an April 2014 ferry ride provided a perspective that inspired the...
5 Step Plan for Seattle Progressives
Yes the 8.8.15 interrupt Bernie stunt "Blew up the Internet." Of course that does not make it good, that means someone got their picture in the paper and in news stories for a cycle or two. Never...
506. Curved Projections
The second poem from the 2015 August Poetry Postcard Fest, this one is really the first, since #505 was a dry run and #506 starts the poems that all lead off with a quote from Joanne Kyger. And I am...
Whalen, Zen and Postcards
Thanks to Sam Hamill's suggestion, I have been reading Crowded by Beauty a biography of Beat Poet and Zen Monk Philip Whalen by David Schneider. Am loving it and finding it a great companion and...
Zen, BLM Shuts Down Bernie
I was at the Bernie Sanders rally yesterday (8.8.15) in downtown Seattle's Westlake Center where he was interrupted a second time by protestors from #BlackLivesMatter. And I get why it is...
After The Japanese 83-86
"The poem beats you down the street*" when the poem is written as an act of discovery. It's part of the joy of an open form. The prophecy in this batch of poems from the series I've been posting for...
Barry McKinnon Interview
To start a poetry culture in a town that had none before your arrival and to have that community continue while you have nothing to do with it, sounds a lot like MY story. There was a short-lived...
Postcard Feedback
I know what you are thinking. Don't put any more energy into things like this, but my strong sense of justice is begging me to respond. So, after changing another dirty diaper from my 3 year old and...
Susan McCaslin on Robin Blaser
Susan McCaslin has a wonderful piece that was posted yesterday to the Cascadia Poetry Fest blog: Trailblazing with Blaser by Susan McCaslin (pdf) From the moment I heard Robin Blaser lecture in my...
Samthology: A Tribute to Sam Hamill
by Paul E Nelson (Editor), Cate Gable (Editor), Lyn Coffin (Editor) A tribute to Sam Hamill in verse, essays and an exclusive interview, edited by Paul E Nelson, Ian Boyden and Cate Gable. Poems in...
Make it True Meets Medusario
Edited by Jose Kozer, Paul E Nelson, and Thomas Walton Make It True meets Medusario, a bilingual poetry anthology, brings together poets from divergent languages, cultures, and aesthetics to create...
A Time Before Slaughter: Pig War & Other Songs of Cascadia
By Paul E. Nelson In this epic poem, Paul Nelson re-enacts the history of Auburn, Washington, originally known as the town of Slaughter. Written in the spirit of William Carlos Williams, Charles...
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.
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