In celebration of winning a Humanities Washington Award, we are sharing the letters of support and recommendation provided by CPL staff and colleagues that assisted us in receiving the award. Today, we are sharing the letter of recommendation written by Zach Charles. Funding for Cascadia Poetics Lab’s programming relies on the generosity of organizations like Humanities WA and YOU, our supporters! You can support CPL by donating to our Giving Tuesday campaign. LEARN MORE HERE. 

Zach Charles first found involvement with CPL through the Poetry Postcard Fest and is now a part of the PPF committee, Cascadia 2050 committee and the board of directors. On top of this, Zach also serves as Paul Nelson’s audio assistant for the Cascadian Prophets Podcast and remasters interviews from our 30-year audio archive. Thank you for your kind letter of recommendation and for all the time you dedicate to Cascadia Poetics Lab, Zach! You can read their letter below.

Zach Charles Humanities WA Letter of Recommendation:

My name is Zachary Charles and I am a Spanish Teacher on Vashon Island, a poet, and a board member of the Cascadia Poetics Lab. I am writing today to recommend Paul Nelson as a recipient of the Humanities Washington Award. I admire Paul greatly, and consider him a friend, mentor, and example to follow as a community leader.

 

On the Humanities Washington website, it states, “Humanities Washington and its partners hold events where people come together to explore and consider what it means to be human, and to reflect on our shared past, present, and future.” I know no one who works harder to create spaces such as these than Paul Nelson, Founder of the Cascadia Poetry Lab (CPL) and the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Immediately upon reading about the quote above, I thought of Paul’s desire to create a low-income shared residence where artists could live and mingle, create work to share with their community, and create events where the community can gather together. It speaks volumes about Paul that this is his dream, and that he wants this housing to be up and running by the time he retires in around eight years. It is perhaps even more important that this would be a part of the culmination of a life lived to build community, from school visits in his neighborhood to his free archive of over thirty years of interviewing experience.

 

Paul and CPL consider a deep experience of one’s own shared humanity to be essential to a fulfilled life, and we want to do our part to make sure everyone gets a chance at it. In annual events such as the Cascadia Poetry Festival, as well as several smaller events throughout the year, the CPL takes an interdisciplinary approach to community gatherings, blending poetry, anthropology, biology, geology, sociology, and more areas of study that are deeply rooted in place. What they want to share is the opening of a finely interwoven net of relationships that brings one to consider their neighbors with kindness and gratitude, human and beyond. They call this way of looking at the world Bioregionalism, and our local bioregion is the namesake of the organization, Cascadia.

 

In a 2015 interview, poet Eileen Myles said, “There is still a lot of power built up around mainstream poetry. People are afraid to give America anything but comfort. It’s like an ad for guilt. Even poetry is supposed to support it. Last year I was a judge on the National Book Award’s poetry panel and I felt there was a weird regard for readability which struck me as a kind of a regard for normality, the regular stuff. And we’re living in extraordinary times so our literary culture needs to wake up.” Her words ring truer than ever today, a decade later. The human experience goes far deeper than comfort. Paul Nelson and the Cascadia Poetics Lab are trying to give communities, especially our neighborhood community in Rainier Beach and the greater Seattle area, the kind of jolt that will lead toward, “… a state where all people seek a deeper understanding of others, themselves, and the human experience, in order to discern and promote the common good,” as the Humanities Washington Vision states.