WCW
Every step once taken in the first advance of the human race, from the amoeba to the highest type of intelligence, has been duplicated, every step exactly paralleling the one that preceded in the dead ages gone by. A perfect plagiarism results.Everything is and is new. Only the imagination is undeceived.
– William Carlos Williams, from Spring and All, 1923.
What did you do during your summer-of-no-summer vacation? Write any poems? Any postcard poems? Drink cocktails festooned with tiny umbrellas? Pine for heat? Go to China? We want a report and a taste of your latest writing in our growing community of poets. Bring new work, bring the work of someone else or come just to be in the engaging company of other writers. It is our third season in Columbia City and the suggested donation is $5 for Living Room. Paul Nelson is your facilitator and will offer Williams and his idea of the imagination to look at poems in a new way in the wake of the New Directions release of the facsimile edition of Spring & All.
Living Room happens in the new SPLAB in the Cultural Corner of the old Columbia School, between Rainier AV S and 36th AV S, on Edmunds. We’re 2 blocks from the Columbia City Link Light Rail Station. Parking is available on the school grounds.)
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.