The Cascadia Poetics Lab board met at the Sou’wester Lodge in Seaview, WA, this past weekend, September 16-18, 2022 for our twice-annual board retreat. We discussed plans for Cascadian Zen, for the visit of Pierre Joris in Cascadia in October, the success of the 2022 Poetry Postcard Fest and other much more mundane matters. Lucky for us Cate Gable is not only a fine poet, but we found out a fine singer/guitarist as well. She performed as part of our outreach weekend performance Saturday night, an event in the pavillion which included 4 poets from the Long Beach Peninsula and 4 CPL poets. Then Cate wrote about it in her weekly Chinook Observer column. Dig this:

To be honest, we were very impressed with the local poets, the local cuisine and, of course, the magical environment of the peninsula and Willapa Bay. Governance Committee Chair Joe Chiveney and his wife Cathy Visser got their dogs to the beach during the weekend near the mouth of the Columbia River:

The legendary Bob Pyle:

Having Bob talk about his work with Krist Novoselić and identify the species of dragonfly I saw on the Rainier Beach sidewalk last week (Blue Darner) AND the butterfly depicted on a poetry postcard I got from Jeffifer Shoemaker was incredibly memorable. We hope to share video of his performance here soon.

We would love to come to your community and discuss our work in using poetry to aid the experience of being now and here, something that sounds so basic but seems to be difficult to achieve in our busy culture.

My huge thanks goes to all the CPL board members, key volunteers, our webmaster and Cate Gable, who welcomed us warmly into her neighborhood and ensured that my fiancee Bhakti Watts would get the most remarkable gnocchi she may ever have in her life.