If you were to visit cascadiapoeticslab.org and click to the Poetry Postcard Fest page, you’d find the following blurb. “The Poetry Postcard Fest is an annual 56 day experiment in spontaneity and community building. This literary event is a self-guided workshop in spontaneous composition where people sign up to send 31 original poems on postcards to folks on a participation list before the end of August. The Fest was initiated in 2007 by poets Paul Nelson and Lana Ayers and has grown to include poets participating worldwide.” 

It’s a joy to talk to one of those initiators today. Paul E Nelson, dharma name Ryukan, is the son of a labor activist father and Cuban immigrant mother, from the west side of Chic-a-go. He moved to King County, WA, in 1988, and has since founded the Cascadia Poetics Lab and its cornerstone event, the Cascadia Poetry Festival. He is a bioregional poet and master interviewer, having interviewed folk such as Brenda Hillman, Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, and many more. He is a member of the Eishoji Soto Zen temple in Rainier Beach, his neighborhood; a spiritual ecology practitioner and advocate for his neighbor dxʷwuqʷǝb, Place of Loon, also called Mape’s Creek; and a force on the spiritual plane as well as this one. 

He is the co-editor of the recently released Winter in America (Again: Poets Respond to 2024 election (Carbonation Press 2025), Cascadian Zen volumes 1 and 2 from Watershed Press, and 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards, from Five Oaks press, among others, and the author of many volumes of poetry, some of my favorites of which are DaySong Miracle (Past 62) from Carbonation Press in 2024, Haibun de la Serna from Goldfish Press 2022, A Time before Slaughter (Apprentice House, 2020), and multiple volumes of interviews.

Sam Hamill said “Over the past decade or so, no one has done more for poetry in the Pacific Northwest than has Paul Nelson.” With the Poetry Postcard Fest, now in its 19th year, that influence is spreading well beyond the Cascadia bioregion and all over the world. 

Check out more of what the Lab does at https://cascadiapoeticslab.org/, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or at https://cascadiapoeticslab.org/cascadian-prophets-podcast-2/.