Give Big

Hello, SPLAB-Fan!

You’ve no doubt been hearing a lot about GiveBIG from local non-profit organizations who look for a little boost during this annual fundraising event.  Through Dollars for Change, Seattle Foundation will randomly select donors through the day to have their contributions boosted by $2500 from a pool of more than $350,000. This means that the more individual contributions given, regardless of size, the more chance there is for us to receive this significant boost to our fundraising.

GiveBIG is this Wednesday, May 10, but checkout the nifty SPLAB page!

Yes, since 2012, we’ve produced 3 iterations of the Cascadia Poetry Festival and have helped another be staged in Nanaimo, BC! We are planning CPF5 in Tacoma October 12-15, in partnership with the Tacoma Poetry Festival. We have (with Leaf Press of Lantzville, BC)  helped create the first bioregional poetry anthology in Cascadia.
In the last 6 years we’ve conducted and placed on line for free, interviews with Brenda Hillman, Nate Mackey, Daphne Marlatt, Cheryl Seidner of the Wiyot Tribe, Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, Susan Schultz, Cedar Sigo, Frances McCue, George Bowering, Andrew Schelling, Willie Smith, Jaap Blonk, George Stanley, Sam Hamill with Ian Boyden, Pageboy Magazine (Sierra Nelson and Thomas Walton), David McCloskey, Graham Isaac, Jewell James, Peter Culley, Juliana Spahr, Marilyn Stablein, Judith Roche, Colleen McElroy, Amalio Madueño, Joanne Kyger, Jerry Martien, Lorraine Arden, Barry McKinnon, Eric Tingstad, Sara DeLeeuw, Ed Varney, John Olson, Pablo Baler, Jean Heuving, Stephen Collis, Evan Flory-Barnes and others! www.AmericanProphets.org
We are helping to expand the EasySpeak open mic series back to the Rainier Valley, create One Day Cascadia Poetry Festivals around the bioregion, including Cumberland, BC, Sept 8-10, 2017 and other projects as well. No single organization has worked to create awareness of the culture of Cascadia and we’re just getting started. No single organization has done more to connect the poets of BC, WA, OR and all of Cascadia.
Do consider a contribution and thank you for your interest in SPLAB.

Paul Nelson

Founding Director
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SPLAB’s Cascadia Work (The Art of Resistance)

Map by David McCloskey

SPLAB has been facilitating events since 2012 that combine bioregionalism and poetry. Perhaps the deepest form of eco-poetics is bioregionalism, making the place you live first in your consciousness over a “state” or “nation” or “province.” That Cascadia includes most of British Columbia (west of the Rocky Mountains) and therefore crosses an international border makes it more interesting (and complicated.)

Iterations of the Cascadia Poetry Festival, which happened in 2012, 2014, 2015 (in Nanaimo, BC, produced by Wordstorm) and 2016 were all successful in different ways and the 2017 event should be the best yet. It will be the first staged in Tacoma and we are just about set to officially announce the entire lineup, which is the biggest thing SPLAB has ever attempted.

Interviews of “Cascadian Prophets” are being conducted with a landing page right now at American Prophets, and efforts are being made to save the SPLAB archive, some of which is on reel-to-reel and disintegrating.

Efforts to have geographic diversity and recognize the part of the bioregion east of the Cascades are ongoing, with a fact-finding trip to Walla Walla planned for late May. There is also a group we’re working with in Cumberland, BC, working on creating a version of the Cascadia fest every other year in that small, Vancouver Island town. They are operating under the banner Cascadia Poetics LAB.

One Day versions of the fest have been discussed with people all over the bioregion, including a place that would seem like a natural fit for such work, Cascadia College. Jared Leising has created an amazing event, while not officially a “Cascadia” event, other than the setting, is very Cascadian and looks like it is a remarkable affair. (It started on April 17th.) I am honored to participate and offer my notions of what resistance looks like from a poetry point of view.

The details:

The Art of Resistance 
(events open to the community from April 17 – 28) 
 
*April 17 – 28 – Protest Art Show (Opening Reception on April 18, 6-8 pm)

Mobius Gallery (M-Th, 10 – 4 pm)
  
*Tuesday, April 25 – “The Written Image: Blending Poetry with the Visual Arts” with Shin Yu Pai

Mobius Hall, 1:30 – 3:00  
 
For a description of the event and a bio of the speaker, please check out this link: https://www.humanities.org/speaker/shin-yu-pai/.
 
Shin Yu’s presentation will last 45 minutes, followed by a Q & A, and a writing activity responding to the new artwork in the gallery.

This event is sponsored by the Ideas and Change Lecture Series, Humanities WA, and Poets & Writers, Inc. 

 
*Thursday, April 27 – “Poetics of Resistance” with Stephen CollisSarah Dowling, and Paul Nelson
 
Mobius Hall, 1:30 – 3:00
 
For information about each poet, please click on the links above.
 
This event will involve each poet performing some of their work, then engaging in a discussion with each other and the audience about the role of poetry in protest and resistance. 
 
This event is sponsored by the Ideas and Change Lecture Series 
  
*Thursday, April 27 – Poetry Reading at the Anderson School featuring Stephen Collis (among others)
 
Thorndike Room, 7 – 9:00 pm

 

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Levertov Plaque Unveiled

A small but appreciative group of Denise Levertov fans (including her former doctor) gathered Saturday (12.3.16) at the house in Seattle’s Seward Park neighborhood to attend the unveiling ceremony for a plaque erected in her memory.

Colleen McElroy was the guest of honor and read a story about her many tea-times with Levertov. Jayne DeHaan, of the Rainier Valley Rotary, the organization that partnered with SPLAB to raise funds for the plaque, took many photos and Miles Welch of the Angeline Apartments in Columbia City battled rain and rebar to make sure the plaque went in with care. Feel free to check it out at 5535 Seward Park Av. S. in Seattle just north of Orcas.

Jayne DeHaan, Rainier Valley Rotary

A big thanks to all the contributors:

Richard and Nina Edelman
Ruth Lepson (whose Levertov poem was read at the event)

Miles Welch, Angeline Apartments

Ann Hedreen (who attended)
T. Clear (who also attended)
Valerie Trueblood
Leslie Donovan
Ron and Les Kinkade
Dick Lourie
Judith Roche
James Rosenzweig
Denise Cottingham
Gregory Wolfe
Susan Parr
Kristine Iredale
Margo Stever
Sarah Mangold
Stanley Sabre
Seattle Review of Books
Melanie Noel
Allison Durazzi & Thomas Hard
David Lasky
Anne Erde
Trudy Mercer
Susan Eisenberg
Mark Pawlak
Tom D’Evelyn
Lynn Learned
Deborah Woodard
Greg Bem
Bill Yake
James Anderson
Joel Sloman
Cindy Smith
Amy Murphy
Kevin Bowen
William O’Daly
Robin Birkbeck
Sam Hamill
Lou Oma Durand
Two Sylvias Press
Raven Chronicles

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Levertov Plaque To Be Unveiled Dec 3

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE (pdf)

MEMORIAL PLAQUE FOR DENISE LEVERTOV TO BE UNVEILED

Seattle, WA, November 25, 2016 — A plaque to honor the memory of internationally-renowned poet Denise Levertov will be unveiled in a ceremony at 10am, Saturday, December 3, 2016, at her former Seattle home, 5535 Seward Park Avenue S.

The memorial is being presented by SPLAB (Seattle Poetics LAB) and the Rainier Valley Rotary, the two organizations who helped raise funds for the plaque. Longtime Levertov friend and University of Washington Professor Emeritus Colleen McElroy is scheduled to attend and address the gathered.

SPLAB Founder Paul Nelson said today, “Denise Levertov was one of the most gifted poets to ever call Seattle home. That there is no public acknowledgment of that is an oversight we felt needed correction. Thanks to the Rotary’s efforts and to the crowdfunding campaign that included some of her longtime friends and fans, this beautiful plaque will inform the generations to come that Levertov lived here, in Seward Park, where she wrote some of the best poems ever written about Mt. Rainier. We honor her life and achievement.”

Levertov lived at the home the last eight years of her life, until her death, December 20, 1997.  In her storied career, she published over thirty books of poems, essays and translations and her work clarifying the open form approach she called Organic Poetry was a huge influence on post-World War II North American poets. Her work and legacy was the subject of a tribute at the recent Cascadia Poetry Festival produced by SPLAB.

###

For more information, contact Paul Nelson at 206-422-5002 or splabman@gmail.com

SPLAB_Logo_BWrainier-valley-rotary-logo

Contributors include:
Richard and Nina Edelman
Ann Hedreen
Valerie Trueblood
Leslie Donovan
T. Clear
Ron and Les Kinkade
Dick Lourie
Judith Roche
James Rosenzweig
Denise Cottingham
Gregory Wolfe
Susan Parr
Kristine Iredale
Margo Stever
Sarah Mangold
Stanley Sabre
Seattle Review of Books
Melanie Noel
Allison Durazzi & Thomas Hard
David Lasky
Anne Erde
Trudy Mercer
Susan Eisenberg
Mark Pawlak
Tom D’Evelyn
Lynn Learned
Deborah Woodard
Greg Bem
Bill Yake
James Anderson
Ruth Lepson
Joel Sloman
Cindy Smith
Amy Murphy
Kevin Bowen
William O’Daly
Robin Birkbeck
Sam Hamill
Lou Oma Durand
Two Sylvias Press
Raven Chronicles

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