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.
ATJ 65-68
I love this notion of pre-bedtime suggestions. I have been doing that the last few months, or more based on the latest poems to be posted here from the ongoing series After The Japanese. I have...
50 Days til Postcards
I am starting to get emails about the August Poetry Postcard Fest. Questions like: 1) Is the fest on this year? (Yes). 2) Can you sign me up now? (No). 3) What are the main changes this year? (This...
Wildcrafting Seward Park
You think of the term "gardener" and something mild is evoked, perhaps an older person, but use the term "wildcrafter" and something subversive is suggested, perhaps with links to paganism. Yet...
Cascadia Dialog
The discussion I'd hoped for after the first and second Cascadia Poetry Festivals, is beginning to manifest in the wake of the 3rd iteration of the fest and the first in Canada. (Nanaimo, B.C. of...
Cascadia Poetry Festival 3 – Nanaimo
Sometimes there are events in my life that are so intense, or have so much action packed into a short time, it takes me a long time to write about them. Having founded a poetry festival for the...
After The Japanese 61-64
My sister Barb once gave me a T-shirt designed to help me remember my roots, my hometown and the pride in which those of us from the Second City have in our town. The message was the same as that...
Clyfford Still: Colville & Beyond
On Sunday, April 19, 2015, I interviewed Patricia Failing, Professor Emerita of the University of Washington about an exhibition she is curating in Denver at the Clyfford Still Museum. Clyfford...
Hillman City Haibun (Tobacco & Other Vegetables)
Maybe it's my Virgo nature that allows me to enjoy vicariously the lives of people whose work I admire but whose lifestyles have aspects I would not care to replicate. I would not say the phrase...
Jeremy Pataky at U Books
It takes a special (or odd) person to live in Alaska, especially by choice and not by birth. The long winter nights would be one reason. I can imagine how all that darkness would be hard to take....
Last Year’s Pandemic Postcard (Not Yet)
My practice each morning includes reading the journal entry from the same day of the previous year. For instance, today I read Monday, April 6, 2020. It was Day 24 of the Shelter-in-Place...
Wild Roof Journal Interview
I was fortunate to have been interviewed by the kind folks at Wild Roof Journal, a periodical which takes its name from a William Blake poem. We discussed the Poetry Postcard Fest, spontaneous...
Holly J. Hughes Interview
Holly Hughes is the author of Hold Fast, Sailing by Ravens, coauthor of The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, and editor of the award-winning anthology, Beyond Forgetting: Poetry...
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.