Advertise on podcast: Cascadian Prophets

This is part 2 of a multi part interview. Listen to part 1 here. After an initial interview, former Catholic Nun Mary Norbert Körte requested a follow up discussion because she felt she had been too harsh on her family. With the fire crackling in the background, she elaborated on the topic, including how her mother worried because she was hanging out with “people who commit adultery and don’t eat right.” She continued to discuss the connection of Beat (as in Beat poet) to the word beatitude, the notion of poets as “oddballs” like the Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins, the coincidental names of places where she has found herself living and how she has felt guided all her life. She also talked about how that guidance in life also happens in her process of composing poetry as Jack Spicer talked about. Poet as radio “receiver.” She also shared about themes from her fear of the afterlife to Denise Levertov. To hear the original audio from this interview, click here. Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website. Come to the Cascadia Poetry Fest to feel like Mary at the 1965 Berkely Poetry Conference!

This interview with Tim McNulty on the 4th of edition of Olympic National Park: A Natural History was recorded Sunday, October 28, 2018, at the home of Tim & Mary McNulty, Lost Mountain, WA. The Poet and Nature Writer lives in these mountains and with these mountains. Read the 4th edition of Olympic National Park: A Natural History and you will see a hundred or more reasons why this corner of the world is unique and why it deserves its status as a UN World Heritage site. Tim has lived in the Olympics since 1991 with his wife Mary and discussed his book, the remarkable part of the world he lives in, and one of his poems about his experience living in and with these mountains. To listen to the original audio of this interview, click here. Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website. To get original poetry right in your mailbox and tap into the weave of universal energy check out the Poetry Postcard Fest. Registration for 2027 begins tomorrow, September 1! To get into the community in person and lifted up by the Cascadian energy, come to the Cascadia Poetry Fest, October 9-11!

Nicole Cromartie and Katie Watson-Best of the Clyfford Still Museum are interviewed about" “Tell Clyfford I Said ‘Hi’”: An Exhibition Curated by Children of the Colville Confederated Tribes.

Interview with Joyce Tsai, Director of the Clyfford Still Museum, on his life and work.

David McCloskey passed away on July 3. In honor of his lifetime of work to create and spread a culture that was deeply connected to the Cascadian bioregion, Cascadian Prophets, which owes more than just its name to his work, want to share this interview from October, 2013. Find it transcribed on our website. To listen to the original audio of this interview, click here. Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website.

Clyfford Still's Astrology by Lulu Zilinskas, an archivist and intuitive practitioner utilizing astrology and tarot. She currently serves as the archivist and manager of digital collections at the Clyfford Still Museum and discusses the aspects of astrology that possibly affected the life and work of Abstract Expressionist legend Clyfford Still.

Michael Holloman (AKA M. Yellowbear) is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of the Colville Indian Reservation, located in Northeastern Washington State. A tenured Professor in the Department of Art at Washington State University in Pullman, he discussed Abstract Expressionist legend Clyfford Still's transformative experience as co-founder of the Nespelem Art Colony.

Phyllis Curott is a Wiccan High Priestess, lawyer, author, and spiritual pioneer. This archival interview from November 2001 was about the growing popularity of religions like Wicca and why they weren't just popular to begin with. She touched on the origins of the propaganda against witches as dangerous people with green skin, big noses, and warts who will turn you into newts, and how the reality is that witches are really just people who pay close attention. She says this is the beginnings of magic as well - paying careful attention. The book in question in this interview was Witch Crafting: A Spiritual Guide to Making Magic.  To listen to the original audio of this interview, click here. Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website. To get original poetry right in your mailbox this summer and tap into the weave of universal energy check out the Poetry Postcard Fest.

This interview with Finn Menzies is an archival interview from November, 2017. Finn Menzies is an out transgender teacher in Seattle, WA. His work is his spiritual practice and his activism. He received his MFA from Mills College. He is the creator of FIN Zine, a bi-annual zine dedicated to his emotional journey throughout his transition. Finn’s debut collection, BRILLIANT ODYSSEY DON’T YEARN came out in 2017 with FOG MACHINE. His poetry can also be seen in Gigantic Sequins, Quiet Lightning, SUSAN /the journal, , SPORK, HOLD: a journal, The Shallow Ends, Big Lucks, and various other journals. Annually, Finn facilitates UNdoing Ego: a workshop on meditation and generative writing practices. To hear the original audio of this interview, click here. Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website. To get original poetry right in your mailbox this summer and build peaceful connections across the globe check out the Poetry Postcard Fest.

If you were to give the third or fourth longest river in the world a wish, it might simply to run free or to be clean and pure again. In the summer of 2013, the world's third longest river, the Yangtze, will get 2,000 wishes in a program called the Kinship of Rivers. The 2,000 will be done through prayer flags, in the spirit of the 1,200 flags that have been placed alongside the Mississippi River and its tributaries over the last three years. These river flags, modeled after Tibetan prayer flags, were accompanied by poetry and art as part of an outreach project designed to promote peace and link people from the Mississippi river communities with that of their Chinese brethren on the Yangtze. the intention is to make a network of rivers with the whole world. The activist, novelist, poet and professor Wang Ping started the project. She was born in Shanghai, grew up on a small island in the East China sea, and attended Beijing university. In 1985 she left China to study in the United States, earning her PhD from NYU, New York University. Her books include 2 collections of poetry, a cultural study, a novel, and 2 collections of fictional stories. To hear the original audio of this interview, click here. Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website. To get original poetry right in your mailbox this summer and build peaceful connections across the globe check out the Poetry Postcard Fest.

How does one make literary art about this time in history that avoids rhetoric and facile political positioning in this era of the spectacle? How does one avoid being consumed by the simultaneous collapse of so many systems -- some being eviscerated by people in positions designed to protect such systems?  Deborah Poe has some idea based on her submission to the upcoming anthology Winter in America (Still.  Deborah is the author of several books of poetry including keep, Elements, and Our Parenthetical Ontology, as well as a novella in verse, Hélène. Her visual works--video poems and handmade book objects--have been exhibited throughout the US. She lives on stolen Coast Salish land, specifically the ancestral homeland of the Duwamish, Suquamish, Stillaguamish, and Muckleshoot People. Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website. To get original poetry right in your mailbox this summer, check out the Poetry Postcard Fest.

Sam Hamill wrote in his final book blurb: “Zhang Er brings us startling 'burial ground poems' from Chinese that are striking in their perspective and elegant in style and presentation. They represent a poetic sensibility that is unique and often profound, and I read them with great surprise and gratitude." Zhang Er, a poet and opera librettist from Beijing, is the author of many books of poetry in Chinese, 2017’s Closest to You, also Verses on Bird and So Translating Rivers and Cities. She has co-edited Another Kind of Nation: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry and her opera libretti in English include Moon in the Mirror and Fiery Jade: Cai Yan. In this April 2019 interview she discussed her book First Mountain (Zephyr Press), co-translated from her original Chinese with Joseph Donahue. To hear the original audio of this interview, click here. Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website. To get original poetry right in your mailbox this summer, check out the Poetry Postcard Fest.

Aldon Lynn Nielsen says the time is right to say it straight, Gil Scott-Heron should be recognized as an important writer. As the George and Barbara Kelly Professor Emeritus of American Literature at Penn State University, specializing in, among other things, African American poetry and poetics, Aldon Lyn Nielsen has published several books of his own poetry, along with scholarly books and anthologies such as Black Chant: Languages of African-American Postmodernism, and his recent essay: Choruses for Gil Scott Heron. Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website. To get original poetry right in your mailbox this summer, check out the Poetry Postcard Fest.

Open the anthology Women of the Beat Generation to page 256 and read the words of Brother Antoninus, William Everson, who said, "A series of women poets emerged in San Francisco who identified with the establish Beat Poets even as they challenged them on their grounds, including Joanne Kyger and Mary Norbert Körte. Of these, the career of Mary Norbert Körte most sharply defines the historic tension between the women of service and the women of passion. The strongest woman poet to emerge in the west, she became a student of Lew Welch, cracking convention within the bastion of the religious order." Raised in a devout family, joining the convent right out of high school in 1952, and stunned by 2 events in the tumultuous 1960s, Mary Norbert Körte continued to make striking poems deeply connected to the land where she lived in extreme southern Cascadia, in a town called Willets, California, until she passed away in 2022. To hear the original audio from this interview, click here. Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website. To get original poetry right in your mailbox this summer, check out the Poetry Postcard Fest.

On the Way to Kluusms is the first poetry chapbook to be published by Watershed Press, a bioregional press based in Seattle, but with strong connections to Vancouver Island. The author is Lorin Medley, whose poetry has been published in anthologies like Winter in America (Again, Cascadian Zen Volume II and Drift: Poems and Poets from the Comox Valley. Lorin lives, gardens and writes from her home in Comox, British Columbia, the unceded territory of the K’ómoks First Nation. She speaks about On the Way to Kluusms, what it means to live in place and how we disconnect from ourselves. Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website. If you liked Lorin's poetry, consider signing up for the Poetry Postcard Fest to have original poems sent right to your mailbox!