Cascadian Prophets

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.

Paul E Nelson interviews Tessa Hulls on Feeding Ghosts her graphic memoir

Poet Roxi Power sings from her new book The Songs Objects Would Sing

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,