Cascadia Poetics LAB logo

PAUL E NELSON

Part of my journal practice is to read the journal entry from the same day of the previous year. A year ago I was ending my residency at The Lake, the last home of Morris Graves. The Morris Graves Foundation was kind enough to believe my recommendation letters and it did not hurt that one of those came from a good friend of Graves, Sam Hamill.

While there I finished two projects, Pig War & Other Songs of Cascadia and Haibun de la Serna. More on each project at each link. Although completely unplanned, many of the haibun turned out to have a Cascadia theme and I included some of them in the Pig War manuscript (which I have sent to one contest and to one publisher for consideration, but would consider a publisher in Cascadia were a good one to express interest in this work.

And while the haibun were an effort to better internalize the neo-barroco method, Pig War is part of a “bioregional animation” of Cascadia. An attempt to discover and help shape the culture of the bioregion where I have lived since 1988, by a few years the longest I have lived in any one bioregion. This animation also involves the ongoing Cascadia Poetry Festival, a MOOC on Innovative Cascadia Poetry to be facilitated through Jared Leising and Cascadia College and a Cascadia poetry anthology to be published by Leaf Press at the next Cascadia Poetry Festival in Nanaimo, BC, Apr 30-May 3, 2015. Regardless of what comes out of this process, I’ll learn something and am searching for a vehicle to continue this cultural investigation/animation.

You can get more background and the text of the 97th haibun in the series here:
https://paulenelson.com/2013/12/13/morris-graves-selected-letters/ but I include the widget below so you may enjoy the sound of the poem. I have read it twice recently, at Menucha, the annual Subud Pacific Northwest Regional Kejiwaan gathering and at Easyspeak Wedgwood, at Peter Munro’s open mic on the 2nd Monday of the month. Thanks for your interest in this work.