Postcards from Mapes Creek
Join us on June 8, 2025 from 4-7 PM at Mapes Creek for a community poetry postcard gathering! At the mouth of Mapes Creek, we will gather with a postcard collage table, food and an open mic for reading postcard poems. This is a casual poetry postcard event, so we would appreciate if any participants would be able to donate materials for the collage table, such as old magazines, glue, scissors, empty postcards, etc. Food will be served potluck-style, so bring your favorite dishes and snacks along with a postcard poem or two to read at the open mic! Seating is limited, so bring a chair. Jim O’Halloran will play flute there along with vibraphonist Susan Pascal.
WHEN: June 8, 2025, 4-7 PM PDT
WHERE: Mapes Creek at Be’er Sheva Park in Rainier Beach
8650 55th Ave S, Seattle, WA 98118
We hope to see you there! We’ll gather at the shelter near the mouth of the creek between the park at the Atlantic City Boat Launch.
Thank you
We would like to thank all supporters who celebrated Give Big 2025 by donating to Cascadia Poetics Lab! It is through your generous donations that Cascadia Poetics Lab empowers people to practice poetry & build community in ways that deepen connection to place, self, and the present moment.
Poet as Radio: Writing from Intuition
A 5-week online poetry workshop designed for folks with a wide variety of experience with poetry and with a keen interest in spirituality and the occult. This course is more than a workshop; it’s a journey into the unknown, where you’ll discover hidden messages and ideas both from within yourself and the outside world. Through chance, divination, games, and ritual, you’ll learn to trust your intuition and let your spontaneity guide your writing.
Sundays 3-5:00 PM Pacific Time
September 7 – October 5, 2025
Poet as Radio: Writing from Intuition
A 5-week online poetry workshop designed for folks with a wide variety of experience with poetry and with a keen interest in spirituality and the occult. This course is more than a workshop; it’s a journey into the unknown, where you’ll discover hidden messages and ideas both from within yourself and the outside world. Through chance, divination, games, and ritual, you’ll learn to trust your intuition and let your spontaneity guide your writing.
Sundays 3-5:00 PM Pacific Time
September 7 – October 5, 2025
We will read The H.D. Book together over 5 weeks. It’s a big book, so that’s a lot of reading, but he’s a joy to read, so it’s not exactly onerous. I will probably talk a bit at the beginning of each session and then open it up to the participants. I wrote the introduction. You should read it first. We can talk about that as well. The goal here is to let Duncan lead us into an encounter with the marvelous as we follow his encounter with H.D. as it led him into the depths of history, mind, and soul.
Wednesdays 5:30-7:30 PM Pacific Time
September 17 – October 15, 2025
Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book: The Roots of Modernism with Michael Boughn
Robert Duncan’s H.D. Book: The Roots of Modernism with Michael Boughn
We will read The H.D. Book together over 5 weeks. It’s a big book, so that’s a lot of reading, but he’s a joy to read, so it’s not exactly onerous. I will probably talk a bit at the beginning of each session and then open it up to the participants. I wrote the introduction. You should read it first. We can talk about that as well. The goal here is to let Duncan lead us into an encounter with the marvelous as we follow his encounter with H.D. as it led him into the depths of history, mind, and soul.
Wednesdays 5:30-7:30 PM Pacific Time
September 17 – October 15, 2025
Life as Rehearsal for the Poem and Poetics as Cosmology 2025 Workshops
A five week online (Zoom) workshop best suited for continuing participants and more experienced poets (open to open form) in workshops facilitated by Cascadia Poetics Lab and Poetry Postcard Fest Co-Founder Paul E Nelson. Participate in reading and discussion of foundational essays, interviews, listening and other assignments, as well as spontaneous poetry composition exercises. In Fall 2025, we’ll explore a short history of Projective/Outside North American Poetry, focused on:
- Whitman & Dickinson
- WCW & Lorine Niedecker
- Olson and Levertov
- McClure & di Prima
- Daphne Marlatt, Brenda Hillman & Nate Mackey
Life as Rehearsal for the Poem (LARFP)
- Sundays, 3-5 PM PDT
- November 2, 9, 16, 23, and 30, 2025
Poetics as Cosmology (PAC)
- Thursdays, 3-5 PM PDT
- October 30, November 6, 13, 20, and December 4, 2025
Cascadia Poetics LAB Blog
Postcards for Prisoners
From Judy Kleinberg: We had an excellent discussion of writing to incarcerated people last night in the Zoom Room. Hosted by Zach Charles and featuring Betty King of Bisbee, Arizona, Matt Trease of...
Sam O’Hana on How to Support Working Class Poets
Allen Ginsberg earned $701 dollars in 1956 from Pacific Greyhound Lines and yet he had plenty of time to dedicate to his true calling, that of poet and cutural activist unlike few poets of the 20th...
Postcards from Mapes Creek June 8
Postcards from Mapes Creek on June 8! Join us on June 8, 2025 from 4-7 PM at Mapes Creek for a community poetry postcard gathering! At the mouth of Mapes Creek, we will gather with a postcard...
Seattle Author Tessa Hulls Wins Pulitzer Prize
Seattle author, illustrator and adventurer Tessa Hulls has won a Pulitzer Prize for her graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts! The memoir dives into 3 generations of Hull's matrilineal history, which...
Postcards for Incarcerated Poets on May 21
Join us in the CPL Zoom room on Wednesday, May 21, from 6-7:30pm PST for a panel on spontaneous composition, community building, and how postcard poems can bring those two things together! In this...
Celebrate Cascadia Day THIS WEEKEND!
May 18 is Cascadia Day and the anniversary of the 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens. On Cascadia Day, we celebrate the Cascadia bioregion in all of its breathtaking beauty, dynamism and ferocity, and...
Cascadia Poetics LAB Blog
Postcards for Prisoners
From Judy Kleinberg: We had an excellent discussion of writing to incarcerated people last night in the Zoom Room. Hosted by Zach Charles and featuring Betty King of Bisbee, Arizona, Matt Trease of...
Sam O’Hana on How to Support Working Class Poets
Allen Ginsberg earned $701 dollars in 1956 from Pacific Greyhound Lines and yet he had plenty of time to dedicate to his true calling, that of poet and cutural activist unlike few poets of the 20th...
Postcards from Mapes Creek June 8
Postcards from Mapes Creek on June 8! Join us on June 8, 2025 from 4-7 PM at Mapes Creek for a community poetry postcard gathering! At the mouth of Mapes Creek, we will gather with a postcard...
Sam O’Hana on How to Support Working Class Poets
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.
Podcast (prophets-podcast): Play in new window | Download (Duration: 59:28 — 81.7MB)
Poetry Postcard Fest
An annual 56 day self-guided workshop in spontaneous composition and community-building.
Poetry Postcard Fest
An annual 56 day self-guided workshop in spontaneous composition and community-building.
Thank you
for an enormously sucessful 8th Cascadia Poetry Festival! Make plans for Cascadia Poetry Festival 9 at the Hugo House and other venues October 3, 4, and 5, 2025.
!
We recognize that our home office is on the ancestral homeland of the Duwamish, Muckleshoot and other Coastal Salish tribes. Our dedication to bioregionalism is to co-exist on this land in the sacred manner as practiced by the traditional ways of these indigenous people.
Statement on Ahimsa by Board Member Jason Wirth
January 20, 2021
The (Poetry Postcard Fest) and the Cascadia Poetry Festival (are) connected… When you’re writing poetry… part of poetry is the craft… rules (to be understood) in a variety of contexts… (Craft is…) a necessary but not sufficient condition. You’re also… experiencing your mind, at a very deep level. And that mind as you experience it more deeply, is not in a vacuum… It’s now and here… rooted in the socio-economic and ecological conditions that make it possible. And participating in… the spiritual exercise of these postcards, is already entering into… a deep bioregional awakening and conversion. In a way we’re trying for something like a spiritual revolution, and that poetry is not just an interesting thing that you can do, if you like. It’s a fundamental exercise of being here in a less harmful way… it’s a deep ahimsa, a deep practice of non-harming and cultivation. And so, it’s all connected… And… our ambition is… trying to have a mind that would be capable, of being in this place in a better way… We’re going to live or die, by how we come down on these issues going forward.
