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 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...
Habib Audio, Interview and Postcards
My posts on the August 2013 Seattle visit of Morrocan poet and Beat scholar El Habib Louai were quite long, (archived here) so I am creating this post in the hopes that viewers of this blog will...
All 2013 Postcards
I have posted all my 2013 POstcard POems in one spot. See: https://wp.me/P1Xnkd-1h7. For more on the fest, see: https://poetrypostcards.blogspot.com/ For the postcard fest Facebook...
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...
Zoomuse, Reading for Subud
SICA-International, the cultural wing of my spiritual community, Subud, has created a weekly cyber poetry series featuring Subud members from round the world who write poetry. I will be featured...
Strange Fruit: Poems on the Death Penalty
I'm delighted to have work in a new anthology entitled: Strange Fruit: Poems on the Death Penalty. It was edited by Sarah Zale and Terry Persun and seeing that our shelter-in-place restrictions...
R.I.P. Michael McClure, 20-Oct-1932 – 4-May-2020
I will never forget meeting Michael McClure, interviewing him in 1995 at the old KZOK-FM studios on Queen Anne Hill, him taking me out for Vietnamese food saying lunch was "on Penguin" (his...
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.