Our second Massive Open Online Course begins tomorrow and runs four weeks through the Canvas portal. The course is being taught by Cascadia College teacher Jared Leising, in association with SPLAB, and is timed to coincide with the 4th Cascadia Poetry Festival. Week three, which happens the same week of the fest, will focus on Denise Levertov.
The course is free and when it was taught for the first time, earlier this year, there were over 450 students around the world enrolled. Please consider joining us. From the course:
Course Description
This is an investigation of the bioregion known as Cascadia (Links to an external site.), using poetry as the main modality for our inquiry.
In doing so, we will focus on the poetic innovators of the region, like Sam Hamill, Gary Snyder, Denise Levertov, Daphne Marlatt, and Stephen Collis, as well as less established poets, to serve as the core of this course.
The course will be organized around four modules, which will include an Introduction to Cascadia Poetics, the Reed College Poets, the Cascadia Poetry Festival (which is happening November 3-6 in Seattle), and New Directions.
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.
