Cascadian Prophets: Recent Episodes
Paul E. Nelson
Interviews with Cascadian creative luminaries about the practice of poetry and deepening connections to place, self and the present moment.
Paul: You know, you moved up here and one of the first things you did as a teacher in Prince George - was it UNBC at the time when you moved here – the University of Northern British Columbia?Barry: No, it was the College of New Caledonia.Paul: And you were teaching English in a welding class?BM: Yup, it was a technical school. We moved into a technical school before they built the college.PN: And this is 1969?BM: Yeah, 1969. But in that first year here we taught out of the high school. We’d start teaching at three in the afternoon after the high school was out, so we were a night school. We were kind of interlopers. The high school teachers thought, “oh, here are these smarty pants academics coming in and taking over the functions that we’ve provided!”
Jerome Rothenberg was a legendary poet, translator and anthologist. His work on various poetry anthologies, including Poems for the Millennium were an inspiration for our Cascadian Zen series. He died on April 21, 2024 and we're presenting this archive audio of the interview conducted in November 2001 as our latest Cascadian Prophets podcast. R.I.P. Jerome! Our introduction from 2001.
Cecil Giscombe talks about his friendship with BC poet, the late Barry McKinnon, about how people in the US consider Canadian poets and about his own work in an interview conducted by Paul E Nelson June 23, 2024 in Prince George, BC.
Bob met me at the retro Atomic Motel and we talked for over an hour about his new book, the poems in it, his childhood, bioregionalism, his trip to Cuba, Vladimir Nabokov's notion via biographer Brian Boyd of "attending to the individuating detail" of one's life (an upgrade from the same notion I've gotten from Blake and Pound) and his general "thing" "close attention to the natural world." It's the June 2024 Cascadian Prophets podcast:
Paul E Nelson interviews Bill Porter on the film "Dancing With the Dead: Red Pine and the Art of Translation as it screens Sunday, April 21 at SIFF Cinema Egyptian.
The Poet Laureate of Wisconsin Nicholas Gulig discussing the influence legendary poet Lorine Niedecker had on his work, recreating her trip around Lake Superior and discussing the poem's similarity with an altar.
In the third and final part of an October 22, 2023 interview Robert Bringhurst, he talks about blister rust, how bioregionalism is an antidote to bad politics and other subjects connected to his 55 page poem The Ridge,
Through his books, I took lessons from Ezra Pound, who was a schoolmaster at heart and had a lot of things to say about what young poets should read and how they should read it. His politics were bonkers, but his ear was a good ear. I learned a lot from him and from others. But it dawned on me one day that my literary schooling had a gaping hole in the center. Except as a colonial construction, the land I was born in – the whole continent and hemisphere I was born in – was missing from this otherwise detailed map of the literary world. It was as if there were no Native American culture, no Native American literature – and I knew this to be false,
The Ridge is a poem in 20 parts, a meditation on a geological feature of Quadra Island, a large island in British Columbia, just north of the Strait of Georgia, and thus the Salish Sea. But the poem is also a meditation on what's happening on the island and on the planet we share in what's been described as devastating imagery. I would add that it's a meditation on the human species as well, at this time in the early Anthropocene.Robert Bringhurst is the author. Trained initially in the sciences at MIT, he makes his life in the humanities from his home on Quadra Island, where he's worked in poetry, Native American linguistics and typography. An officer of the Order of Canada, former Guggenheim Fellow and winner of the Lieutenant Governor's Award for Literary Excellence. He's our guest today to talk about The Ridge. Robert, thanks for your time and hospitality.
The second half of our July 4, 2023 interview with Steven Thomas, former Seattle poet, co-founder of the Seattle Poetry Festival and former teacher at University Prep. He discussed his life, struggles with addictions, move to Germany and his latest book of poetry What is Between Us.
Stephen Thomas 7.1.2023Before moving to Europe, Auburn, Washington native Stephen Thomas was quite active in the Seattle literary scene. He came back to Seattle (& other parts of the U.S.) to read from his new book What Is Between Us published by Hand to Mouth Books of Walla Walla. We sat on the deck of the Casa del Colibrí in Rainier Beach and had our chat about his poetry influences, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, the Cabaret Hegel, the arts venue he created and about the new book. The recording of his July 1, 2023, reading at The Booktree in Kirkland can be heard here. My intro went like this: Stephen Thomas was born into a working class Catholic family in Auburn, Washington in 1950. At 12 a teacher played a recording of Emily Dickinson’s poems and he says “his fate was sealed.” A pillar of the Seattle poetry scene of the 80s, 90s and 2000s, he founded the Cabaret Hegel in an abandoned factory and presented with many notable performers such as Steven Jesse Bernstein. Stephen Thomas has published work in Exquisite Corpse, Poetry Northwest, the Malahat review and other publications and he currently lives in Germany’s Black Forest where he co-founded Gemeinschaft Sonnenwald, a sustainable agriculture community.
The latest Cascadian Prophets podcast is an interview with Ann Batchelor Hursey, author of Field Notes: To Maya Lin’s Confluence Project Landscapes, and Lou Cabeen, the artist responsible for the Field Notes Companion artist book. The introduction:
Roll on, Columbia, roll on. Your power is turning our darkness to dawn sang Woodie Guthrie in what is the official folk song of the State of Washington. The Columbia is the largest river by discharge flowing into the Pacific from the Americas with dams that provide millions with power at the expense of Celilo Falls and other natural features which sustained indigenous people for thousands of years. Field Notes To Maya Lin’s Confluence Project Landscapes is a book by Ann Batchelor Hursey focused on the 438 mile long project designed by Maya Lin, the architect and artist who may be best known for her Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Ann’s work is also featured in the Field Notes Companion art book created by Lou Cabeen. Lou discusses the book in a video just below and the podcast is below that. Thank you for listening!
The International Peace Research Association gathered May 17-21, 2023, in Port of Spain, Trinidad for their 2023 conference. I attended and was in the company of some of the world's most brilliant scholars of peace. To be in this multi-racial country, to be welcomed with great warmth by the locals and to be treated to a reiki session were all part of the amazing experience. That my mother was born in the Caribbean (Cuba) may also have been a factor in the ease I felt being in that part of the world. Hearing so many English accents was also wonderful, as was the local cuisine, including "Doubles."Once the conference ended, the Co-Secretary General of IPRA, Matt Meyer, sat down with me to answer a few questions about IPRA and the conference. I plan to attend the 2025 IPRA conference and perhaps present on Poetry Postcards as Peace Project. Enjoy!Matt Meyer, IPRA, Trinidad 2023, with Paul E Nelson
Carletta Carrington Wilson discusses Poem of Stone & Bone in honor of James W. Washington Jr.
It is a collaboration that’s a book, but not a book that you’d bring to bed with you before turning the lights out. It’s also been described as “protest beauty” and is the collaboration of a printer (really, a book artist) and a poet, who’ve created “a full multi-sensory experience about both personal and collective crises of the past few years” or so it is described in the introduction. The book is Heavy Lifting. The printer is Felicia Rice of Moving Parts Press and the poet Theresa Whitehill and we talk to them today via Zoom to see how all this came together, what it means to create stunning works of art that are also books and how we engage the realities of the anthropocene.
CPL Board Member Jason Wirth has arranged for Dr. E. Richard Atleo to speak at Seattle U. This is a remarkable opportunity to hear about Nuu-Chal-Nuth cosmology. Details below. I had the good fortune to interview Dr. Atleo in 2005 and included the transcript in my first book of transcribed interviews American Prophets. I hope to see you at Seattle U, March 1. Details:Healing and Reconciliation:A Nuu-Chal-Nulth PerspectiveDr. E. Richard AtleoWednesday, March 1, at 4pmOberto Commons, SINE 200Zoom access is availableRSVP for the conversationDr. E. Richard Atleo, whose Nuu-chah-nulth name is Umeek, is a hereditary chief. He is widely and duly celebrated both for his analysis and promotion of the Nuu-chal-nulth concept of "tsawalk," oneness, the interdependence of all things, and for fostering our respectful relationship and negotiation with it. He has written two contemporary classics on this theme, Tsawalk: A Nuu-Chal-Nuth Worldview (2005), and Principles of Tsawalk: An Indigenous Approach to Global Crisis (2012). He will draw on his vast experience and his life in two cultural worlds to speak to healing and reconciliation.Dr. Atleo's contributions include the creation of the First Nations Studies Department at Vancouver Island University where he also taught as well as the Universities of Victoria, Manitoba, Simon Fraser, and UBC. Beyond his roles in academia, Dr. Atleo was a social worker, elementary school teacher, principal, federal ministerial assistant, and assistant superintendent of education. Dr. Atleo received the Equity Award from the Canadian Association of University Teachers, where he served as a member of the Equity Committee since its inception. His contributions extend to other organizations, including roles as co-chair of the Scientific Panel for Sustainable Forest Practices in Clayoquot Sound, and as a member of the board of Ecotrust Canada.
What a blessing it was December 28, 2022, to interview Shuri Kido, the accomplished Japanese poet and Zen practitioner. As I told he and his translators (Tomoyuki Endo, Forrest Gander) on that occasion, I don't know of a higher calling at this time than building bridges between different cultures. What a stunning effort Names And Rivers is! Thank you Shuri Kido, Tomoyuki, Forrest and Copper Canyon Press! I especially am taken with the Zen notion of "transparency" as it appears in the poems of this collection.The audio version of this interview is available below and there is a video version here. Here is my introduction to the interview:Names and Rivers is a book of poems by Shuri Kido translated from his native Japanese into English by Forrest Gander and Tomoyuki Endo and published by Copper Canyon Press. Shuri Kido is known as “the far north poet” and one of the most influential living poets in Japan. Forrest Gander is a poet and award-winning translator and Tomoyuki Endo is an Assistant Professor at Wako University in Tokyo with interest in modernists and postmodernists such as Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams and Gary Snyder among others.
Brenda Hillman interviewed on her 2022 book In A Few Minutes Before Later by Paul E Nelson for the Cascadian Prophets podcast
Our latest Cascadian Prophets podcast guest is Wendy Call. She is translator of Isthmus Zapotec poet Irma Pineda. The new book is In the Belly of Night and Other Poems and Wendy talks about how she learned Spanish, how she came to know this woman whom she calls an indigenous "rock star" in Mexico, involved in "language defense" and about Irma's striking poems which at once illustrate and strengthen a culture under attack by corporate globalization. My introduction to our December 8, 2022 chat:Poetry not just as artistic expression but as “language rescue” or “language defense” is at the core of a new book written in Isthmus Zapotec, an indigenous language from Mexico and then into Spanish and then English, all of which are included in the book. Irma Pineda is the author of In The Belly of Night and Other Poems and her translator Wendy Call is our guest to talk about the book, about language defense and the modern threats of the Internet & television and also about Irma and Isthmus Zapotec culture. Wendy Call is a writer, editor and translator. Author of the book No Word for Welcome: The Mexican Village Faces the Global Economy, and the chapbook — part of a series of artist residencies she completed in U.S. National Parks, her narrative nonfiction, essays, and other creative nonfiction have appeared in fifty journals and magazines, and we’re delighted to have this time with her to talk about Irma Pineda.(Wendy also encourages translators to submit to an upcoming anthology of literary translations. See this.)
The latest Cascadian Prophets podcast is about Cascadian Zen from the three co-editors of the book, Tetsuzen Jason Wirth, Adelia MacWilliam and Paul E Nelson (your humble correspondent.) We recorded the chat Sunday, November 27, 2022 on Salt Spring Island after the launch of Adelia's first chapbook Details of the Passage, "a few select poems of a larger collection that address the collective amnesia in the descendants of the first European settlers on the west coast of British Columbia." This was part of an art exhibit featuring six generations of her family in and near Salt Spring Island.This is a major effort of the Cascadia Poetics Lab and in the podcast are some news items about the book and the launch. Enjoy!
Cascadian Prophets interview. Why are only 8% of Hollywood movies produced by women, down from 9% 20 years ago? One Hollywood film-maker says the “male gaze” reinforced by a camera angle formula and a subject-object dynamic creates an industry rife with employment discrimination and sexual abuse and assault. That film-maker is Nina Menkes, the Producer and Director of Brainwashed: Sex Camera Power. The movie is showing now in select theaters and it is both disturbing and compelling, as well as uplifting.
Pierre Joris talks to Paul E Nelson on A Nomad Poetics and reads the poem Letter to Steichen, Ed
“I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet.” A quote attributed to John Quincy Adams, though it is quite possible that is a paraphrase. To go from being a gang-banger in Othello, Washington, to a bigger gang called the U.S. Army, almost dying three times in the theater of war, to find himself as a poet, interviewing undocumented people and telling their stories in lyric verse in Spanish and English. This is the story of Ricardo Ruiz and it’s told in his debut book: We Had Our Reasons or Teníamos Nuestras Razones in his lengua materna.
How to capture the soul of a subject, live your life dedicated to your own art, the process of discovery and even plan your syncretic memorial so that all your ducks are in a row? This seems to me efficient, humble, gentle and visionary all at the same time and could describe the work & life of artist Fumiko Kimura. Co-Founder of Puget Sound Sumi Artists, her life story was written as a collaboration with David Berger, and he’s our guest today to discuss Fumiko’s life, his study with her and her art. The book is Persimmon and Frog: My Life and Art, a Kibei-Nisei’s Story of Self-Discovery. David is an author and artist and former visual arts critic at the Seattle Times. David welcome. (The podcast is below the bonus audio tracks.) David Berger An Empty Sky Haiku David Berger Into Waiting Hands Haiku David Berger on Haiga
I had the good fortune on Sunday, July 17, 2022 to travel to the home of Michael Daley, on Fidalgo Island, to chat with him about his poem Romance with the Unexpected, a new chapbook, as well as his life as a poet/bioregionalist. The sounds of planes, ravens and his dog are heard in the background of the recording which was conducted on the back deck outside his geodesic dome home. Michael was one of the original bioregional poets of the early 1980s in Port Townsend and, until recently was publisher of Empty Bowl Press. My introduction for the interview: (Click the image to hear Michael Daley read the entire poem.)How does one end up in a place some call the bioregion of Cascadia and develop their skills as a poet, publisher and human? It might require a “Romance With The Unexpected.” That’s the title of a beautiful new chapbook by Michael Daley, a transplant decades ago to our part of the world. Michael Daley was born in Massachusetts, is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts and has an MFA from the University of Washington. He was publisher of Empty Bowl books in Port Townsend, Washington, from 1976 to 1982 and again from 2017 to 2022. His first collection of poems, The Straits, appeared in 1983 and he’s published several books of poetry, translations and a novel. He is co-curator of the Pelican Bay Books & Coffeehouse Poetry Reading Series in Anacortes, Washington, where he’s lived since retiring from teaching English at Mount Vernon High School in 2012. Michael, thanks for your time today.
Interview with Claudia Castro Luna, recorded 17-JUNE-2022 via Zoom about her new book Cipota Under the Moon published by Tia Chucha Press.
Patrick Mazza's blog, The Raven, exists: "To inform the people-power movements crucial to addressing the crises coming upon us at national and global levels, from increasing national divisions and breakdown of institutions, to the climate crisis."
Interview with Pierre Joris recorded May 2, 2022 by Paul E Nelson for the Cascadian Prophets podcast.
Interview with John Brehm, author of The Dharma of Poetry. Recorded by Paul E Nelson for Cascadian Prophets podcast on February 24, 2022 in John's Portland, OR home.
The paintings of Kenjiro Nomura are featured at the Cascadia Art Museum in Edmonds, Washington and a new book by art historian Barbara Johns, Kenjiro Nomura, American Modernist: An Issei Artist’s Journey, is the topic of discussion.
BC poet Fred Wah talks about his lecture The Simple, as well as the concept of serial poetry and his Music at the Heart of Thinking.
James Rasmussen is a Duwamish Tribal member and Superfund Manager for the Duwamish River Cleanup Coalition. he talked with Paul E Nelson about his Duwamish heritage, about the effort to gain federal recognition of the Duwamish Tribe, the entities that are fighting that recognition, the land recognition announcements that have become common and the Real Rent Duwamish campaign.
Greg Bem interviews Seattle poet/interviewer Paul E Nelson 4 days after his 60th birthday about his poetry and his work with the Cascadia Poetics LAB (the former SPLAB.)
A 2011 interview with Seattle poet and fiber artist Carletta Carrington Wilson conducted by Paul E Nelson. They talked about Wilson's poetry, filled with Garcia Lorca's notion of duende, what first drew her to poetry (or how poetry called her in elementary school) about how her work reflects her study of slavery and some of her own work which haunts her and which comes from the voice of a person who was enslaved. She calls it the "history of the disappeared."
Larissa Lai joins Paul to talk about a host of topics from colonialism in contemporary China to the haibun form, the Tao Te Ching, and her new book, Iron Goddess of Mercy.