Cascadian Prophets

The 9th Cascadia Poetry Festival is happening October 10-12th, 2025 at the Rainier Beach Community Club. One of the featured poets is Sharon Thesen, a legendary B.C. poet who considers herself a "Cascadian poet."

The latest and perhaps most complete translation of Han Shan has been done by Levitt in collaboration with Kazuaki Tanahashi and published by Shambhala Press.

Four contributors to Winter in America (Again discuss how they respond as writers without resorting to rhetoric or invective. The outrages, for any person of conscience in the United States in the trump 2.0 era, almost come hourly. Many warned of a constitutional crisis were we to find ourselves in this situation. Disappearing non-violent citizens and tourists to for-profit gulags while key cabinet members demonstrate no familiarity with the concept of Habeas Corpus ought to tell you something.

A couple years back I steered a kayak over the stone remnants believed to be of that dammed weir and felt the tears of Southwind and his grandmother that broke the spell of ice and separation. In a moment I felt that wheel turning me, releasing the grief over my own people, still a mystery to me from centuries of migrations, of imperial assimilation, erased by the cold wind of empire and science and the myriad attempts to dam up the natural world with standardized time, supply chains, and rows and rows and rows of repeatable little boxes we stuff our brains and bodies into.

When I said that what's good for general society is also good for poets, I'm talking about a series of cultural opportunities where a much wider stretch of people are allowed to take the opportunity to become writers. I came back from a conference last week where I presented some research on the demographic aspects of the New American poets. The poets that were born and came to maturity in the early to mid-20th century were beneficiaries of broad national scale longevity gains. This [includes] things like pushbacks against tuberculosis, against polio, against poor nutrition and infant mortality. These are gains that were made by the medical and scientific institutions, but also by general prosperity, by making more food available to more people and making that food shelf stable for longer. So, when you talk about what might make it possible for poor people to do more creative work, you could start by saying well we should just give people more money, but the fact of the matter is that plenty of people already have the wealth they need, they just don't actually have any time.

To go back 30 years in one's writing is an exercise fraught with the possibility that the material is very dated, but this book, Cloudhand, Clenched Fist, by Rhea Miller, is a large exception.

Sam Hamill said “Over the past decade or so, no one has done more for poetry in the Pacific Northwest than has Paul Nelson.” With the Poetry Postcard Fest, now in its 19th year, that influence is spreading well beyond the Cascadia bioregion and all over the world.

I am grateful today to bring you an interview with Anne Tardos on Cascadian Prophets, reading from and speaking about her newest book: The Always Already Absent Present.

An interview with Jewell James, Master Carver and Director of the Sovereignty and Treaty Protection Office with the Lummi Nation

Sanskrit translations, a deep bioregional sense of place and homages to dead (mostly) poet friends makes Andrew Schelling's new book a compelling distillation of subjects he’s been tracking for over 40 years. Author of “Tracks Along The Left Coast: Jaime D’Angulo & Pacific Coast Culture” and “From the Arapaho Songbook” and many other titles, he lives in the mountains outside of Boulder, Colorado, and teaches poetry and Sanskrit at Naropa University. The new book is Forests, Temples and Glacial Rivers, published by Empty Bowl.