Cascadian Zen Banner, Background: EcoRegions of Cascadia, Copyright © 2022 David McCloskey, Cascadia Institute; available from Feathered Star Productions.

Empowering people to practice poetry & deepen connections to place, self & the present moment.

We believe that poetry is the nexus

at which self-knowledge, bioregionalism and expansive creativity converge. Cascadia Poetics Lab is a vibrant community whose workshops, festivals, and opportunities for connection can open the door to transformative experiences.

On Our 30th Anniversary

Help Celebrate our 30th Anniversary! Cascadia Poetics LAB is getting ready to celebrate our 30th Anniversary on February 2, 2024! This event will feature the official launch of Cascadian Prophets (Interviews 1999-2023), by Paul E Nelson, with Editor Sharon Thesen....

Giving Tuesday 2023

Throughout the year, we organize events designed to foster a community of like-minded people centered around organic, open-form poetry, and an ecological philosophy that emphasizes a connection to our bioregion, its history and the indigenous people that lived here long, long before colonization. We aim to expose our supporters to ideas about art as an art-of-living practice, inspired by the spiritual practice of understanding the bioregion surrounding us: soil, air, water, flora, fauna, and weather. In 2023, we hosted a successful Poetry Postcard Fest and the 7th Cascadia Poetry Festival, along with launching Watershed Press and publishing our anthology Cascadian Zen Vol. I. This is all thanks to donations from people like you!

Gabriella Gutiérrez y Muhs Sociology Interview

In the interview, Gutiérrez y Muhs discusses her journey from child farmworker to a professor with multiple degrees from multiple institutions, including Stanford University and Occidental College, and explains the values she learned from her working class background that she was able to incorporate later into academia. She also mentions her role as the 2018-2020 Theiline Pigott McCone Endowed Chair in the Humanities at Seattle University and her role as editor for Presumed Incompetent, both positions allowing her to focus on uplifting Chicanx and Latinx voices and highlight experiences of unequal treatment for POC, queer and working class people in academia.

Lorna Dee Cervantes Interview (April on Olympia)

by Splabman | Oct 31, 2023

Lorna Dee Cervantes Interview on April on Olympia

Podcast (prophets-podcast): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:12:25 — 99.5MB)

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Poetry Postcard Fest

Cascadia Poetry Festival

Interviews

Banner for Workshop Poetics as Cosmology Overland to Levertov

Online Workshops

Books

cascadian zen

Thank You to Our Partners and Alliances:

Mt St Helens illustration by Roberta Hoffman

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We recognize that our home office is on the ancestral homeland of the Duwamish, Muckleshoot and other Coastal Salish tribes. Our dedication to bioregionalism is to co-exist on this land in the sacred manner as practiced by the traditional ways of these indigenous people.

Statement on Ahimsa by Board Member Jason Wirth

January 20, 2021

The (Poetry Postcard Fest) and the Cascadia Poetry Festival (are) connected… When you’re writing poetry… part of poetry is the craft… rules (to be understood) in a variety of contexts… (Craft is…) a necessary but not sufficient condition. You’re also… experiencing your mind, at a very deep level. And that mind as you experience it more deeply, is not in a vacuum… It’s now and here… rooted in the socio-economic and ecological conditions that make it possible. And participating in… the spiritual exercise of these postcards, is already entering into… a deep bioregional awakening and conversion. In a way we’re trying for something like a spiritual revolution, and that poetry is not just an interesting thing that you can do, if you like. It’s a fundamental exercise of being here in a less harmful way… it’s a deep ahimsa, a deep practice of non-harming and cultivation. And so, it’s all connected… And… our ambition is… trying to have a mind that would be capable, of being in this place in a better way… We’re going to live or die, by how we come down on these issues going forward.