Saturday night (5.2.15) at 10:30PM in Nanaimo at the 3rd Cascadia Poetry Festival, the After Party.
Read one poem and get off the stage. Slam poets give way to sound poets and experimental poets hear from academic poets and the occasional nature poet thrown in. Your humble narrator is host.
Daniel Wolff has published numerous well-received nonfiction books, including a national best-seller that won the Ralph J. Gleason Award for the best music book in 1985. He was nominated for a Grammy in 2003 and was named Literary Artist of 2013 for Rockland County, New York. He has also collaborated on documentary films with Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs), pop songs, and performance pieces.
Jeanne Morel has taught in factories, hospitals, colleges, arts organizations, retirement centers, and prisons. Her chapbook, That Crossing Is Not Automatic, was published by Tarpaulin Sky, and one of her very short attempts at fiction was nominated for a Pushcart. Recent poems have appeared in december magazine and Floating Bridge Press, and on the websites for Poetry on Busses and the Oregon Poetry Association. She has an MFA from Pacific University and lives in Seattle.
J.W. Marshall co-owns and operates Open Books, a poetry-only bookstore in Seattle, with his wife, Christine Deavel. He has work forth-coming in Hubbub, Poetry Northwest, The Volta, and the anthology Make It True: Poetry from Cascadia published by Leaf Press. His first collection, Meaning A Cloud, won the Field Poetry Prize and was published by Oberlin College Press.
Poets are getting ready to squeak in Nanaimo:
Make It True: Poetry from Cascadia, published by Leaf Press, will be launched at VIU Friday, May 1st, at 7:30pm. This anthology is a collection of innovative and influential poets of Cascadia, the bioregion which stretches from Cape Mendocino in the south to Mt. St. Elias, Alaska, to the north and to the Rocky Mountains in the east. It will be a survey of the bioregional poetry scene, beginning with an introduction by the co-editors: Paul Nelson, Nadine Maestas, Barry McKinnon and George Stanley.
The tenor of the poetry will arise from the comments made by George Stanley at the 2014 Cascadia Poetry Festival on the “Innovations from Here” panel. On that occasion he discussed how Modernism was a revolt in part from the excesses of Romantic poetry and Post-Modernism was a revolt in part from the academic and formalist influence on poetry in North America. (Some notes on his talk are here.) He said that what we have in large part in contemporary poetry is irony, a tone which has permeated everything in our culture from sitcoms to advertising. A revolt from that would be poetry that is realistic, or sincere, without giving up the use of speech, as Charles Olson said, that is “least careless and least logical” and techniques such as experimental lyric, spontaneity, collage and other composition methods. Work that exudes, as Robin Blaser put it, “a spiritual chase.” We believe the times we live in call for a deeper response to issues like economic inequality, climate chaos and out-of-control capitalism which on a separate panel at CPF2 Stephen Collis likened to a “doomsday device.”
