Nathaniel Mackey’s visit to Seattle was a remarkable weekend. He gave a reading and facilitated a workshop at SPLAB on Saturday, March 12 and gave a prose reading and engaged in a conversation at the NW African-American Museum on Friday, March 11.
Earlier on that Friday, Nate sat down with SPLAB Founder Paul Nelson to discuss his poetry, his poetics and the soul-building opportunity for a poet in wartime.
He also discussed his wariness of the notion of “coherence.” Certainly the postmodern era is one in which realities are plural and relative. He noted:
We have to be wary of the will to cohere because, as we’ve seen, the will to cohere – certainly in the west – has led to these qonquistadorial regimes that just regard, for example, the non-European as irrelevant; to be subjugated or eliminated but certainly not to be invited in as a vital participant and a source of information about the expansive possibilities of being human.
Here are links to Nate’s:
Saturday, March 12, 2011 reading
His reading of the Splay Anthem poem On Antiphon Island
The Friday, March 11, 2011 interview with Paul Nelson and
The March 12 workshop (huge file).
Again, SPLAB is grateful to Poets & Writers, 4Culture, The Seattle Office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, WESTAF, The Shirley Marvin Hotel, Island Soul Restaurant, CD Forum, Jeanne Heuving and all the dedicated SPLAB volunteers and Board Members. Thank you!
Our Fall 2011 Visiting Poet will be Brenda Hillman, November 11 and 12, 2011.
About Splabman
Poet & interviewer Paul E Nelson founded SPLAB (Seattle Poetics LAB) & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Since 1993, SPLAB has produced hundreds of poetry events & 600 hours of interview programming with legendary poets & whole systems activists including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Robin Blaser, Diane di Prima, Daphne Marlatt, Nate Mackey, George Bowering, Barry McKinnon, José Kozer, Brenda Hillman & many others. Paul’s books include American Prophets (interviews 1994-2012) (2018) American Sentences (2015) A Time Before Slaughter (2009) and Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies (2013). Co-Editor of Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia (2015), 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards (2017) and Samthology: A Tribute to Sam Hamill (2019) Make it True meets Medusario (2019), he’s presented poetry/poetics in London, Brussels, Nanaimo, Qinghai & Beijing, China, has had work translated into Spanish, Chinese & Portuguese & writes an American Sentence every day. Awarded a residency at The Lake, from the Morris Graves Foundation in Loleta, CA, he’s published work in Golden Handcuffs Review, Zen Monster, Hambone, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2014 Robin Blaser Award from The Capilano Review, he is engaged in a 20 year bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia and lives in Rainier Beach, in the Cascadia bioregion’s Cedar River watershed.
Nathaniel Mackey’s visit to Seattle was a remarkable weekend. He gave a reading and facilitated a workshop at SPLAB on Saturday, March 12 and gave a prose reading and engaged in a conversation at the NW African-American Museum on Friday, March 11.
Paul and Nate ~ ~Marvelous! Thank you, both!
Thanks Lissa. Would love to interview you someday. Abrazos, Paul