Rainier Valley Lit Crawl, March 8, 2015

The pub crawl is a tradition that goes back to the 19th century. A group gets together and drinks in a series of bars. Maybe the participants are new to a town. In Australia they had over 4,000 people do a pub crawl once, a Guinness world record.

LIT Crawls go back only about ten years or so, apparently starting in San Francisco in April FEST logo2004, and featuring performances by poets and writers at a series of nearby bars. A.P.R.I.L. brought the concept to Seattle a few years ago, on Capitol Hill. Aaron Kokorowski, and Graham Isaac did a series of 5 lit crawls in 2012/13 in the Greenwood neighborhood and Greg Bem and Ra’anan David are among the organizers for one happening in the Rainier Valley, March 8, 2015. They have invited me to read.

This is a great test for the Hillman City and Columbia City neighborhoods of Seattle. Hillman City especially, my neighborhood for the last three years, is an up & coming part of town, still more diverse than most of Seattle, and attracting exciting new businesses like Big Chickie, the Brasa Chicken restaurant and The Collaboratory, among other places. The Collaboratory is an “Incubator for Social Change” and has a garden, a kitchen and cooking lessons and a progressive Methodist church run by John Helmiere, a Dartmouth grad who has been arrested a couple of times for standing with the Occupy movement as they protested the Port of Seattle and at Alaska Airlines, protesting their opposition to the $15.00 minimum wage and their role in attempting to repeal it.

Hillman City

Hillman City

And gentrification is on the mind of many locals, so that is part of what will be touched on by participating poets and writers. I’d love to see you attend this and take part in a real moment for these two neighborhoods. Thanks for considering and thanks to Greg Bem and Ra’anan David and other organizers for inviting me.

(poster here)

rainier valley lit crawl flier 2 small

(This post was originally published at www.PaulENelson.com)

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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