2024 Cascadia Poetry Festival 8 – Seattle Workshops

Writing and Meditative Openness: How They Interact

a workshop with Daphne Marlatt and Fred Wah

This workshop will consider the space between words as a site of open potential. Dwelling in the hesitation and silence of the gap, the writer sights the unsighted, hears the unheard in a moment of equivocation and choice.  Fred and Daphne will refer to their work on two Cascadian rivers, the Columbia and the Fraser, as writing moments of awareness and presence.  The workshop will offer participants an opportunity to apply this poetics in a brief exercise.

This workshop is open to Cascadia Poetry Festival 8 Workshop Package holders. It will be conduced during Cascadia Poetry Festival 8, at a time and venue to be announced to workshop registrants. 

Poetry as Walking and Mapping

a workshop with Jami Macarty and Meredith Quartermain

“Observe the street, from time to time, with some concern for system perhaps,” begins Georges Perec’s series of instructions to himself on a Parisian street, “Apply yourself.  Take your time.” Who are the people he asks: “People in a hurry. People going slowly. Parcels. Prudent people who’ve taken their macs. . . “

“Imagine a town running,” Daphne Marlatt begins her series on the fishing village of Steveston, “where chance lurks/ fishlike, shadows the underside of pilings, calling up his hall/ the bodies of men & fish corpse . . .”

“gastown¹” writes Juliane Okot Bitek of a Vancouver tourist attraction, “where²  bc³ jade⁴  is⁵  sold⁶  alongside other canadiana where mischief⁷  is made at the steam clock on the hour every hour

¹ where this city’s gaslighting takes place
² where else is this kind of disingenuity so brilliantly performed because don’t you know don’t you remember that the romance of the steam clock is predicated on your forgetting how the time keeper stole us
³ neither british nor columbian on these unceded lands
⁴ not thai not chinese neither british nor columbian but of these unceded lands
⁵ & is not british or columbian but repeating this british and columbian does not make it so but it wards off the memory keepers who insist on the otherwise of this tale
⁶ oh yes like people were like goods like animals is but also ever us
⁷ forgotten don’t forget that”

After some in-class orienteering, we will venture on a walkabout of the surrounding area, researching and collecting “landmarks” to map in our poems of place. In the second half of the workshop, we will draft our findings, share our routes, and explore ways to follow the trail of our research into poems.

Participants will depart this workshop with poem drafts, ideas for a poetic series, a reading list for further study, and a community of fellow travelers.

This workshop is open to Cascadia Poetry Festival 8 Workshop Package holders. It will be conduced Friday, November 1, 2024, at Spring Street Center. Time to be announced to workshop registrants.