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.
A Little History: The Deeply Personal as Political
(This essay was recently published in Zen Monster.) (download pdf for best formatting) A Little History: The Deeply Personal as Political (Some notes on a book by Ammiel Alcalay) There were two...
Brenda Hillman at Open Books, Sunday 10.27.13
Brenda Hillman reads at Open Books tomorrow at 3p and I first met her at Open Books in 2010, I think it was. She has just completed her tetralogy of meditations on the elements, ending up...
93. The Fog Wet Web
Who could resist the term meteorologist Cliff Mass is using for this deeply socked-in fog situation we find ourselves cutting through here in Seattle? Fogmageddon. Not me. Combine that with the...
More on Spring & All
Open Books: Poetry in Conversation, No. 1 (pdf) I’d meant to write a blog post about the first in what promises to be a very interesting series of discussions about books of modern poetry at...
ACLU, Javier Sicilia Event
As a parent of two healthy, intelligent and beautiful daughters, I would not want to imagine the pain of having to bury one of them. I am honored to be a part of an ACLU event Saturday night which...
32. Bear Camp Road
It has been over a year that I have been attending open mic events regularly again. I once described myself as an "open mic addict" but did not realize that Red Sky Poetry Theater was an exception,...
New Pageboy + Release Party
I was delighted to get the email that alerted me to the latest edition of Seattle's Best Little Magazine (according to "The Stranger.") That my pals Greg Bem and Nadine Maestas were in it was good...
How to Resist Occupying Forces
In the U.S. Federal Government shutdown, created by the power a relatively small group of Congressmen have on one of the two main political parties in the U.S., has parallels to other occupying...
Government Shutdown/Biosphere Shutdown
In my last (non-postcard) post, I made reference to a review in B.C. Bookworld about a book on climate change from a Canadian author who foresees the huge invasion in Canada of USAmerican "climate...
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...
Plugging Into the Current: The Immediacies of Daphne Marlatt’s Writing
I had a flurry of activity about a month ago. I prepared a talk for a poet's society with which I was engaged for a couple of months to serve as a sort of "dress rehearsal" for a talk at a...
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.