The Poetics of Cascadian Land and Water with Harod Rhenisch banner

Harold Rhenisch

Harold Rhenisch’s 13th full-length book of poetry, The Salmon Shanties: a Cascadian Song Cycle, is a series of long poems about the salmon of Cascadia and the people who call to them, written as a companion to Ezra Pound’s Cantos. It was short-listed for the 2025 Purdy Prize. Harold’s 22 other books include three bioregional memoirs in the style of Barry Lopez and Annie Dillard and work on four environmental photography books (with photographer Chris Harris), including Motherstone (on central-Cascadian volcanoes) and Spirit in the Grass (on the last pristine grassland, in central Cascadia.) He has worked as editor and mentor for decades, and has taught writing at both the Victoria School of Writing and Vancouver Island University. He writes the blog Okanaganokanogan.com, and lives in Vernon, British Columbia.

The Poetics of Cascadian Land and Water

A 5-week online Cascadian poetry workshop, on Zoom.

This is a workshop in poetic fusion. Cascadia began with a language that united cultures: Chinook Wawa. This series of workshops expands its gift of integration between the ancient languages of the Columbia and its new languages, French and English. To do so, it draws in American, Canadian, Wawa and North European poetries, with a concentration on opening doorways. The first workshop explores Chinook Wawa to place traditions of language and poetry within Cascadian place, opening doors for Wawa to lead us closer to land and water. The second workshop explores the Old Norse language of land and sea that Cascadia’s first Europeans, northmen from the Scottish islands, brought to the Columbia. It is a workshop in English as an Indigenous language, opening doors for one-on-one conversations with other languages of the land. The third workshop explores the contributions of various French dialects and cultures, which arrived simultaneously from Quebec, le-Pays-d’en-Haut and Louisiana. It is a workshop in the breadth of language as civic discourse. It mines American (think: Ezra Pound and Denise Levertov) and British Columbian (think: Charles Lillard and Daphne Marlatt) models for techniques of integration across dictions, allowing history to be written on Cascadian terms. The fourth workshop explores the transcripts of the Walla Walla Treaty Council of 1855. This all-important council was conducted in Wawa and recorded in English. The workshop explores the differences between American and Indigenous uses of Wawa at the council and then applies them to expansions of current poetic models in what has long been a land of translation. Black history at Hanford is part of this story. The fifth workshop references integrative traditions from British Columbia which fuse British and American poetic traditions. It explores line breaks in detail and how they guide bodies moving in space. Our goal overall is to speak as Cascadians, from here and from our rich linguistic tradition, emphasizing voice, person to person, people to land, and the past to an integrative future.

Saturdays 3-5:00 PM Pacific Time
January 10, 17, 24, 31 & February 7

Cost: $125.00