Cascadia Poetics LAB popped onto my radar in 2018 with the Postcard Poetry Fest. We were living in a temporary apartment – one bedroom with bed, the other bedroom full to the doorway of boxes stacked ceiling height – a parking spot while we waited for our 3-story Seattle house to sell – after which we moved into even smaller space – a bedroom in my son’s house – while we shipped our stuff south. I was thinking a lot about all of the 30 or so places I had lived in my life, about moving yet again and leaving behind the Seattle house in which I had lived the longest and been the happiest. I wanted to move, no question, thanks to southern California’s climate and new twin granddaughters – but I was not looking forward to the “new kid in class” routine. Postcard poetry seemed like the perfect way to keep my poetry going in a small space, without my books, and to have something to look forward to in the mail besides junk. I was, by the way, also having my first chapbook published by Finishing Line Press – so I had proven something to myself but needed to figure out my next project.
I experimented with collaging my own postcards, wrote poems to go with – enjoyed it so much I asked Paul Nelson for his street address so I could send him a postcard of thanks. Here’s what I wrote:
Dear Paul – whose hands hover over yours
at the keyboard? The owl might tell but
she’s a shill for the forbidden elite. A thank you
hides near the red X and by the way,
you start reading in the lower left-hand
corner, James Baldwin eyes point the way.
He never got a bit of risk-free-guarantee –
is there such a thing? The hand we are dealt
a befuddle of promise, a bafflement.
We bet anyway, whatever we have
pushed to some middle. You won’t win
at poker with this hand, but you aren’t here
to play a card, or a card game, are you?
I thought not. A pleasure meeting you ̶
Splab away, Splab away, Splab away,
and postcard poems, olé.
Diana in San Clemente
Meanwhile I had poked around the Cascadia website and loved the poetry-of-place ideas, and the idea of thinking about how where you live as a creature sharing space with seen and unseen living things shapes your life and therefore your poetry: place as less of a street address and more of a bioregion, determined by watershed, topography, geology; its cultural history prior to “discovery” by colonizers, climate, endemic flora and fauna. Signed up for the postcard fest again. I had taken over a dozen classes at Hugo House (Seattle) in the original old house that had been a mortuary, then the temporary location in the priests retirement home next to the Frye Museum, and finally the whiz-bang modern version (which Richard Hugo would not have liked). After moving I remained a supporter and took classes via zoom, when Hugo House began having its moment of reckoning over diversity issues (2020). I saw Paul’s blog on the subject. He offered to talk to anyone who wanted to know more about it so I called him. I was impressed with his honesty and his energy – and shortly thereafter came on to the board as Secretary.
Covid was peaking; getting acquainted in our new home had come to a stop; I had plenty of time on my hands. I took some of the classes CPL offered, read a bunch of poets I had barely heard mentioned in the 60’s and 70’s when I was getting my English degree – or poets I had dismissed in my youth because they weren’t big names, were too experimental, never mind that I felt I just didn’t “get” the poems revered by many of professors. Listened to a few of the hundreds of podcasts on CPL’s website. And I just let my poems take their shape – didn’t worry about their form, but how they sounded, grounding them in the breath, in conversational rhythms and the immediate moment more often (not always), and paying attention to where I had moved – the coastal desert of Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego Counties, home to Disneyland, Hollywood, Legoland, Camp Pendleton, “boarder” heaven – surf, snow, skate park – an often hilarious contrast to Cascadia. Also birthplace of the John Birch Society, a hotbed of libertarians, and a fascinating strain of surfer yahoo/anarchist libertarians. Never have so many orthodontists, plastic surgeons, alternative medicine advocates, and crystal gazers gathered in one place.
Yes, Cascadia Poetics LAB is definitely about “poetics” – a particular theory about the art of writing poetry rising out of the Cascadian bioregion. What being part of the CPL community has done for me is revised and broadened my understanding of what poetry is, and can be showed me what it means to “practice poetry” as a way of being present in the world (“Poetry as Cosmology”) introduced me to poets I’d never heard of (including a bunch of Canadians, among others) suggested to me an approach for discovering yet another new-to-me location introduced me to a whole community of poets and artists beyond a personal writing group
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