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.
American Sentences-June, July
I told this story on Facebook last week: After a ride on the 358, I get where John Burgess is coming from with his Aurora bus updates. I sat down in the back row next to this guy who started talking...
Tin Umbrella Suggests Hillman City’s Coming Up
Mer and I moved from Columbia City to Hillman City in October 2011. The neighborhood just south of Columbia City, it's still more diverse than Columbia City and (as of this writing) has none of the...
Notes on The Practice of Outside: Robin Blaser’s Divine Real
Notes on The Practice of Outside: Robin Blaser’s Divine Real (pdf) Before I knew Robin Blaser’s work, I knew of Robin Blaser, having found out about him through my early poetry investigations of...
Penultimate Postcard Update
I got the latest postcard update from Brendan McBreen (see below) with the new list of 243 people, easily a new postcard record! Am a little stunned and very excited about the fest and (as noted...
Brian Love Memorial
I attended the Memorial for Brian Love at the Auburn Adventist Academy Church yesterday (7.17.13) and recorded the service. (Hear the audio of the first half by clicking here. The 2nd half starting...
Postcard Update
The man coordinating the list for the 2013 August POetry POstcard Fest, Brendan McBreen, informs us that 179 poets have signed up so far and the cut off date is less than two weeks away. (His update...
Writing or Re-Writing
I was fascinated to see a post from one of my Facebook friends, Jim Andrews, linking to a piece in the Boston Globe about how the practice of extensive revision of one's writing is a 20th Century...
Brian Love Update
As I posted on the SPLAB blog* last week, Brian Love, a longtime SPLAB volunteer and all-around handyman, was killed by a drunk driver on July 5th. The man accused of the crime, Floyd Gonzales, will...
90. Slow Down Tahoe Driver (For Brian Love)
Elegy for Brian Love
An elegy for my friend Brian Love, who helped run SPLAB in Auburn 1997-2004, helped me with my syndicated public affairs radio show and was killed by a drunk driver on the morning of July 5, 2013.
A Time Before Slaughter/Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia
When the box of books arrives at your house and for the first time you hold your new book in your hand, it is quite an experience. I remember moving to Seattle in 2009 and having the first box of my...
POPO is Here (Early)
Faced with the prospect of not having any (in person) poetry readings for a while due to the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) and self-isolation for several weeks, the SPLAB Board agreed with my notion...
(Streaming) Lyric World Conversations with Koon Woon
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED DUE TO THE CURRENT COVID-19 PANDEMIC I was delighted to be part of an event that features a local poet who has been part of the Seattle literary scene for many years and...
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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