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.
Margin Shift Reading Series
It has been described by one Seattle writer as a reading series that leans toward: "the academic, conceptual and slightly Canadian." It is Margin Shift, a new poetry reading series run by a...
Hillman City Haibun 9 Anagrams
It was probably in 1995 or '96 that Danika Dinsmore made me aware of a form of poetry called Present Beau, a kind of poem that employs the restraint of using only the letters in someone's name in...
After the Japanese 41-44
This series of poems, posted four at a time and archived here, continues with some written on a short retreat in Marblemount, WA, near North Cascades National Park. They are all written in response...
Robin Blaser’s Last Interview
I was searching for my interview with Robin Blaser online and it appears the link that was the best, from Lou Rowan's Golden Handcuffs Review, is down and I'm going to rectify that here. Actually...
Gig Alert! Seattle Center, Rainier Valley, Tacoma
Gigs Ahoy! I'll be participating in several readings over the next few weeks. I'll have manuscript versions of Pig War & Other Songs of Cascadia and other merch. Saturday, March 7th, 2-6P at the...
Hillman City Haibun 8 (Resistance is Futile)
The photo did not crash the internet, but got my friends talking, or expressing concern from Seattle to Cuba to Moscow to Morocco and beyond I am sure. As reported in an earlier haibun, I am...
Albulhassan, Clark, Greco, Triese Chapbooks
I am so envious of these four chapbooks and delighted they were gifts recently given to me. All from Cascadians and all quite worth while. Wikipedia (by way of the O.E.D.) says: "Chapbook is first...
Cascadian Spirituality
I should not have been so naïve to think a post that referenced religion would have gone by without someone reacting as if I'd just stabbed a pig. But add Facebook and the culture of narcissism and...
Hillman City Haibun 7, Father, Lawns, Bangs, Chickens
Going through Fatherhood a second time, there are many notions that go through my mind on a regular basis. One is what will be my youngest daughter’s earliest memory? I think about dancing in the...
After The Japanese 37-40
I'm going over the manuscript of these poems written last year, a few at a time, and marveling at how prolific was one weekend retreat in Marblemount, Washington. Set and setting, eh? Using each of...
Ed Varney (A Lot of Nada)
It was Michael McClure in about 2004 who suggested I go beyond the U.S. when studying Open Form poetry. That led me to José Kozer (Cuban, though living in Hallandale Beach, FL) and poets in B.C....
Pocket Lint (A New Journal)
I have admired Warren Dean Fulton for years, maybe since I saw some of his cute little chapbooks like the U.S. Sonnets of George Bowering: That was published by Pooka Press in 2007. Warren's been on...
Responding to the Black Mystery School Pianists
I saw this article linked in an article I was reading and then a friend sent it to me, so there was something synchronistic about it right off the bat. “God’s way of remaining anonymous” some wise...
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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