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.
Cascadia 2 Starts Today
So the Cascadia Poetry Fest articles and blog posts are now popping, see Paul Constant in the Stranger with an article on bioregional poetry with this quote: It's important that poetry is embracing...
Covington Library 6P Apr 23
On Wednesday, April 23rd at 7PM, at the Covington Library, 27100 164th Ave SE, Covington, WA 98042, I'll be bringing three Seattle poets for a Poetry Coffeehouse. Judith Roche, Peter Munro and Amber...
Cascadian EcoPoetics
The term Ecopoetics has been in vogue since about the turn of the century. Beyond the well-known "nature poem" I take this term to be used with the insinuation of a little more responsibility on the...
Joe Chiveney and Cathy Visser
The SPLAB Board President, Joe Chiveney, has been an incredible asset since joining SPLAB a few years ago. I joke that non-profits should have counselors on their boards, because they are used to...
Marion Kimes Dead at 84
I started investigating the Seattle Open Mic scene in 1994 and soon found a home at Red Sky Poetry Theater. I attended one of the last, if not the last Red Sky reading at the Ditto Tavern and then...
American Sentence (Zappa Elegy) Compilation
As you may have read, my beloved cat Zappa died last Sunday (3.30.14) and Peter Munro said the next night we'd hoist one in his memory at our 5th Monday EasySpeak gathering, which we did. I did a...
What Drives Cascadia Culture?
Part of the reason we chose the headliners we did for the 2nd Cascadia Poetry Festival is because my short investigation of innovative Cascadia Poetry has led me to a couple of early conclusions: 1)...
IndieGoGo for Cascadia Poetry Fest
We're starting a crowd-sourcing campaign! https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/cascadia-poetry-festival The 2nd Cascadia Poetry Festival at Seattle U and Spring Street Center May 1-4, 2014, is the...
Zappa, Dead at 17
Zappa came into my life in the middle of 1997 and we estimated his birthday at April 1, 1997. He was a remarkable cat. He had to have been to live with me for almost 17 years. My oldest daughter...
SPLAB 20 Year Bioregional Cultural Investigation
It has been the core of SPLAB's work since 2012 to engage in a bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia. We owe a huge debt to David McCloskey's groundbreaking work, his evocative maps and...
Blue Rivers Writers Gathering
I once attend the the Blue River Writers Gathering, a biannual gathering at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest whose purpose, according to their website, is: to take counsel from each other and...
Some Notes on the Minuses
I was having a discussion with an elder poet about a poetry experience that I had recently which left me feeling outside. The funny thing is that's where I want to be. I can't do anything but...
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.