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.
Subud LGBTQ Youth Movement
One of the most memorable events at the recent 14th Subud World Congress in Puebla, Mexico, was a meeting centered around the acceptance (or lack of it) in the Subud community. Keep in mind our next...
478. Hipster Cancer
477. Still Echoing (For Lennie Tristano)
I've blogged about the inspiration for this poem before but here is the text and postcard image and below find the Soundcloud widget.
Fighting Coal Trains with Totem Poles (Jewell James)
Today I had the honor of interviewing Jewell James of the Lummi Tribe about his effort to create awareness and organize opposition to the export of coal from Wyoming and Montana to developing...
Ontological Kinesiology in Puebla
It was quite a melange of cultures in Puebla during the 14th Subud World Congress August 1-17, 2014. (See my previous posts here and here.) To give you some sense of how diverse the event was, these...
476. Logic of Ordnance
This poem continues from the last postcard poem and Levertov's notion of the acts that serve as counterstrokes to the ills of the world. She would have been writing about WWII, a war in which she...
475. Counterstroke
As with all 2014 August Poetry Postcard Fest poems, this one uses Levertov again as the source of its epigraph and the poem continues the theme of that quote and it weaves through familiar...
474. Ghost Training
The fourth poem from the 2014 August Poetry Postcard Fest, this one continues in the theme of the notion of The Practice of Outside. That an ancestor of Levertov was said to be able to understand...
473. More Listening Than Longing
Here is the 3rd postcard poem from this year's fest and my 473rd overall since the postcard fest started in 2007. I love the Levertov quote to begin this poem. How many times do we hear poems that...
Prostate Cancer Update
I was asked by my local spiritual community, Subud Greater Seattle, for an update on my treatment for prostate cancer. An excerpt: I was diagnosed with prostate cancer on February 17, 2020 and had...
Poetics as Cosmology
Poetics as Cosmology (Intro to Spontaneous Composition) A six week online (Zoom) workshop for people who have had a little experience in spontaneous poetry composition and want more. Join SPLAB and...
Rattlecast #54 (Watch the Interview)
Back in March before we had a sense of how COVID-19 the novel Coronavirus would change our lives forever, Rattle Magazine's Tim Green invited me to sit down (via Skype) for an interview about my...
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.