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.
98. Why Redwings Sing
When asked how my residency at the Lake, the final home of legendary artist Morris Graves, my stock response has been "stunning and miraculous." I was awarded a residency almost a year ago by the...
David McCloskey on Cascadia Part 3
David McCloskey is a retired Professor of Sociology at Seattle University, and founder of the Cascadia Institute. I got the chance to interview him on October 30, 2013, at his home in Eugene,...
An Update to Writing or Rewriting
The update of an essay, (Writing or Re-Writing: A Primer on Prevision) really a series of notes, on some of the history of what Robin Blaser called "The Practice of Outside" centers around Brenda...
American Sentences August – November 2013
I have finally gotten a chance to harvest American Sentences from the last few months. As you may know, this is my 13th year of writing one every day and I've about 37 left for 2013. Found poems,...
David McCloskey on Cascadia, Part 2
David McCloskey is a retired Professor of Sociology at Seattle University, and founder of the Cascadia Institute. I got the chance to interview him on October 30, 2013, at his home in Eugene,...
Wanda Coleman, Dead at 67
I was the emcee one year at the Bumbershoot Literary Arts stage, 1999, back when that stage and the small press fair was the unofficial kickoff of the Seattle literary arts season. After a short...
David McCloskey on Cascadia
After hearing about the concept in bioregionalism (in about 1991 or so) and getting interested in an organizing effort that went deeper than politics, I created the Cascadia Poetry Festival in March...
Morris Graves Residency Report
I am just back from the best and most intensive writing retreat/ residency of my life and a quick trip to L.A. to visit José Kozer (& his wife Guada), see Amalio Madueño, meet Pablo Baler (&...
Community Self Reliance (Michael Shuman)
The seeds for a bioregionalist perspective in me were planted by the late Peter Berg of the Planet Drum Foundation during an interview I conducted around 1993, but the interview I am posting today...
PEN America Emergency Writers Fund
Artists have to train themselves to not link their own self-esteem to outside validation. In THIS culture, the job is much harder because of what the composer Charles Wuorinen said to the New York...
Sam Green’s ATBS Binding
Huge gratitude goes out to Washington's first Poet Laureate, Sam Green, who has bound my new book A Time Before Slaughter/Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia. He did it a week or so ago and sent...
Lewis MacAdams Dead
This was in the L.A. Times tonight: Lewis MacAdams, a poet and crusader for restoring the concrete Los Angeles River to a more natural state and co-founder of one of the most influential...
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.