Having over the keys to a poetry festival you’ve created can be a nerve-wracking experience, unless the people given the keys are BETTER DRIVERS! Huge thanks to the Nanaimo, BC, local organizing committee for making the 3rd Cascadia Poetry Festival a huge success in every way imaginable. Thank you:
David Fraser, Kim Clark, Mary Ann Moore, Ann Graham Walker, Kim Goldberg, Yvonne Blomer, Jay Ruzesky, Ursula Vaira, Brandon Letsinger, Naomi Beth Wakan, Leanne McIntosh, Shaleeta Harper, Philip Gordon.
Thanks also to VIU, the Painted Turtle Hostel in Nanaimo and all the sponsors. I’ve embeded festival videos on two main pages:
and the closing comments from David Fraser and I are here:
and will end this short note of appreciation with photo montages taken from images
Kim Goldberg created. It appears the fest will continue in Seattle, Fall 2016. If you want to help organize and be involved in the job of reconnecting North Cascadia with the South and determining where we live based on natural and cultural demarcations rather then political ones, get in touch. – Paul Nelson splabman (at) gmail (dot) com.
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.
