Thanks to Ra’anan David, video of the main events from the 5th Cascadia Poetry Festival, held October 12-15, 2017, in Tacoma, are now online:
7:30 Friday Main Stage: Readings featuring scheduled poets: Patricia Smith, Bruce Weigl, Lorna Dee Cervantes, Lucia Misch and Philip Red Eagle. MC – Jared Leising.
War Poetry/ Veterans Panel. MC – Abby Murray. Scheduled panelists, Philip Red Eagle, Bruce Weigl, Doug Johnson, Gary Copeland Lilley & Simone Gorrindo.
Tacoma’s Richard Brautigan: Life and Legacy Panel. MC – Nadine Antoinette Maestas. Scheduled panelists: Ianthe Brautigan, CAConrad, Tod Marshall and John Tanner.
Saturday Main Stage: Readings featuring scheduled poets: Ianthe Brautigan, C.A. Conrad, Sharon Thesen, Gary Lilley and Tod Marshall. MC – Thomas Walton.
Brautigan/Bernstein Plaque Unveiling:
Closing reading, Michael McClure, 5 days before he turned 85 years old.
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.
