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Cascadia College Sponsor Letter
by Splabman •

Photo by Roy Miki
Poetic habitat now is a workshop to be conducted by legendary Canadian poet and feminist Daphne Marlatt. The workshop happens as part of the 4th Cascadia Poetry Festival at 9am on Friday, November 4, 2016, at Spring Street Center. Class size is limited to 15 participants and two people for auditing purposes. Cost is $80 and Gold Pass holders are given priority. More info here. Registration here. From Daphne’s description:
What might a biocentric poem look and sound like? What would happen to a writer’s subjectivity in such writing? How might what Denise Levertov calls “the poetry of linguistic impulse” enact the habitat of both poem and earth/world? Bring a poem (in any form) you might have written in response to these open-ended questions. We will explore what such questions and their concerns bring up in the process of writing.
For the first year SPLAB is participating in the Seattle Foundation’s Give Big program. The Seattle Foundation was a supporter of SPLAB from back in our Auburn days (1997-2004), and our 2016 goal is modest, $3,500.
We want to guarantee a sold-out house for the 4th Cascadia Poetry Festival in Seattle, November 3-6, at Spring Street Center. We have secured a remarkable lineup: Brenda Hillman, Daphne Marlatt, Colleen McElroy, Sam Hamill, Roger Fernandez, Sarah DeLeeuw, Janie Miller, Peter Munro, Judith Roche, Marilyn Stablein and others in the intimate setting of the Spring Street Center for Mainstage readings, the Living Room democratic reading, panels, workshops and a tribute to Denise Levertov, including a ritual walk to her grave in Lake View Cemetery.
Our goal is 100 contributions of at least $35, which will guarantee the giver a Gold Pass to attend all festival events.* Please consider supporting this work via Give Big, as festival tickets will not be available until July 4 and thanks in advance for your support of the work of SPLAB since the founding of the organization in 1993. Other sponsorship levels: $100 – Small Press Sponsorship, $500 – Douglas Fir Sponsor, $1000 – Red Cedar Sponsor.
*Space is limited in the venue, so please arrive early to ensure a good seat.
The 4th Cascadia Poetry Festival is set for November 3-6, 2016 at Spring Street Center in Seattle. Capacity of the venue is 80 and so Gold Passes will be at a premium. They will go on sale in the next couple of months and will be $35 for every fest event except for workshops, which are to be announced soon.
The Local Organizing Committee will meet Saturday, January 9, 2016, at 1pm. If you are interested in being part of the group that makes this iteration of the fest happen, please get in touch with Festival Founder, Paul Nelson at (206) 422.5002.
Key needs right now are:
Webmaster
Bookkeeper
Grant Writer/Coordinator
Volunteer Coordinator
A great feature on Lary Timewell, another Make It True: Poetry from Cascadia poet: http://jacket2.org/commentary/lary-timewell-two-new-poems
Make It True poet Jen Coleman on Gary Snyder’s breasts. Really. I mean not “on” them, per se, but “about” them. Watch:
Gary Snyder’s Breasts from Jen Coleman on Vimeo.
Buy a Cascadia map! Guaranteed to break the ice at parties!
This from Señor Cascadia, David McCloskey:
Who’s Older?
Make It True poet George Bowering has a new website: GeorgeBowering.com and will be touring the country in support of the 4 books he’s publishing this year — The World, I Guess (poetry), 10 Women (short fiction), Writing the Okanagan (anthology), and Attack of the Toga Gang (middle-school novel) — a prodigious output for a man a quarter of his age. – See more at: http://newstarbooks.com/blog/bowering-tour-2015/#sthash.LbXeMkdK.dpuf
See also this story about the 14 year old, Ivy Zhang, who saved Bowering’s life. Also: http://www.vancourier.com/…/vancouver-writer-meets-rescuers… ““It’s no fun getting really old but it’s better than getting really dead,” he said before he left the ceremony, laughing as he did.”
Make it True poet Lissa Wolsak is among those shortlisted for the 2015 bpNichol chapbook award. She was nominated for Of Beings Alone: The Eigenface (Nomados Press). From the press release:
TORONTO – October 21, 2015 – The Meet the Presses collective is excited to announce the finalists for the 2015 bpNichol Chapbook Award. The prize, awarded annually since its establishment in 1985, goes to the author of the best poetry chapbook published in Canada in the previous year. It is named in honour of the late poet, novelist, and micropress publisher bpNichol…
Poems from this collection are represented in Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia.
Four Cascadia poetry-related notes today:
As part of the 50th Anniversary celebration Bennett Library’s Special Collections & Rare Books Division has mounted a display on Blaser’s life and work. Materials are drawn from the extensive Blaser archive, housed in the Contemporary Literature Collection of Special Collections and Rare Books. The exhibit runs September 10 – October 30.
Details: http://www.lib.sfu.ca/about/branches-depts/special-collections/robin-blaser-display
2. Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia poet Allison Cobb has just released Plastic: An Autobiography. She says: The autobiography of plastic is the autobiography of everything.Because plastic is so ubiquitous, I thought that I could probably uncover a direct link between my body and the plastic inside a dead albatross chick some three thousand miles across the ocean. If I could do that, maybe I could draw the net wider. I could see how wide, how far, how long I could stretch this net connecting my own body to this substance: plastic, which barely existed one hundred years ago and which now is so amorphous, so omnipresent, it seems to disappear if one tries to look directly at it.
Read more at http://www.essaypress.org/ep-35/#TTgiubarpI7DsuZE.99
3. George Bowering and George Stanley talk Cascadia and the anthology Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia. It happens in the first podcast from New Star Books of Vancouver. More here:
http://newstarbooks.com/blog/hhs01-bowering-stanley/
4. Jared Leising is putting together a MOOC on Innovative Cascadia Poetry. The Make It True poet who also teaches at Cascadia Community College, brought groups of students to two different iterations of the Cascadia Poetry Fest. Working with Seattle Poetics LAB, he’s planning an early 2016 launch for the six week course that will focus on some of the innovations from here. More details soon.