Living Room Tuesday, October 4 – 7PM 98118 Lives!

Heather McHugh

“To be frank, the inevitable panel discussion on the ‘poetry of place’ bores me: it takes place too
literally. The place of poetry is nothing less than the place of love, for language; the place of shifting ground, for human song; the place of the made, for the moving.”
-Heather McHugh, Broken English

“The poetry of place” can be interpreted in many ways. Place can be topographical, domestic, institutional, intellectual, emotional, spiritual, natural, urban, artificial, linguistic, etc. Often, our poems document these places, get written within these places, and, on the page, become places of their own.

Living Room happens every week in a dynamic, diverse, and gentrifying place. We will use South Seattle’s 98118 zip code as an example of the many meanings of place and how they can inspire and inhabit our poems. Then we will do a short exercise to help us identify, visit and poke around our own senses of place. Anthony Warnke is your facilitator.

Bring a piece of work you’d like to read for our critique session (place-based or not). Writers of all ages and skill levels gather Tuesdays at 7P to read new work, the work of someone else or to just be in the engaging company of other writers. Your donation of $5 helps SPLAB put on special events and continue programming. Please bring 8 copies of the work you plan to read. If you do not bring copies, they are available for 10c.

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.
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