Cascadia Festival Braids the Land with Words
The power of poetry to evoke landscape and connection
Cascadia. It’s a land braided with water in its myriad forms—streams, rivers, waterfalls, lakes, ponds, marshes… And according to former Seattle University Professor David McCloskey, it defines a region of the Pacific Northwest in North America that is bounded, not by arbitrary lines on a map, but by a bioregion. McCloskey coined the term “Cascadia bioregion” in 1981, outlining its contours on his Cascadia Map in 2015. This bioregion in his view stretches all the way from northern California to Alaska, bounded on the east by the Rocky Mountain trench. [1]
Paul Nelson, founder of the Seattle’s Cascadia Poetry Lab, is a friend of McCloskey’s and a believer in his vision of the Cascadia bioregion. With that in mind, Nelson established the Cascadia Poetry Festival. I attended one such event in Nanaimo, BC in 2015 co-hosted by Kim Goldberg, where I first met Paul. After a lapse of a decade, I attended the Cascadia festival held at the UBC Okanagan campus on March 1st and 2nd, with the theme, “Cascadia: A Braided Land.” Vernon-based poet Harold Rhenisch was largely responsible for organizing the event in partnership with MFA student Slava Bart. Slava and I connected immediately, and I look forward to hearing more about his thesis on the theme of how poetry is a form of time, as all art becomes shapes cut from time.
Rhenisch was generous in his inclusivity, bringing in both academics and non-academics such as myself, to ensure this fullness of voicing could be heard. He acted as MC for the event, taking notes and summing up briefly each speaker’s themes. Repeated acknowledgement was made that the Okanagan is the unceded territory of the Syilx people. Yet Rhenisch stressed inclusivity rather than demeaning the contributions of colonial culture, which—like it or not—remains a reality on the Cascadia landscape. He proved adept at braiding it all together. The invitation sent out to poets and writers summed it up succinctly:
“This is a land braided over at least 20,000 years between humans, earth, air, water, fire and spirit. It has many dimensions that, despite colonial settlement, remain intertwined. We will honour this entwined nature by organizing our schedule within Cascadia around the important threads of land, water, air, fire, spirit, people, and spaces which display their lack. Our goal is to weave these voices together into the braid of which they are all a part, and to include both voices rooted in history and place and those to whom the region is new… We trust that the addition of new voices will both strengthen the weave and add new threads to it.”
I won’t attempt to cover every presentation at Cascadia this year, opting instead for personal highlights. (For a complete list of presenters see Harold’s blog here.) Two days of intellectual heavy lifting from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm daily is a lot of material to cover, and left me exhausted at the end of each day. And as with any smorgasbord, some items I found irresistibly tasty and others, not so much.
Day two took us outdoors in the sunshine to gather by a beautiful aspen tree overlooking the pond on the UBC campus. We were serenaded by red-winged blackbirds and magpies, even this man-made pond already flourishing with bird and plant life. We listened to UBC student Emma Carey speak of attuning to the unique properties of invasive species, Jeanette Merrick talk about her attempt to shift the paradigm of commercial landscaping into something more holistic, and Lorin Medley read her “Poems of Water” based on a lifetime living on the Pacific coastal landscape. She said the Okanagan felt alien to her and a little forbidding, being such a contrast to the coastal rainforest, but that reading the poems here helped eased the transition.
Harold Rhenisch recently published an epic new book of poems, The Salmon Shanties: A Cascadian Song Cycle, that weaves together Cascadian place names—both Indigenous and settler—and of course the many natural elements that make the region so lush and green. Rhenisch is a spirited performer who fully embodies his poems when he reads. Though the term is overused, there is indeed an incantatory quality to these poems reminiscent of passages from the Bible: “Have mercy upon the men of the porcupine grass, my sea, according to your rain: / according to the multitude of your tender salmon, blot out their transgressions.” [2] Throughout Rhenisch’s visionary book, the salmon swim like ghosts above the landscape, hindered by our hydroelectric dams that forever altered Indigenous life-ways. We can no longer live without electricity in our highly technological society, so ways must be found to adapt that are less dismissive of voices that speak without a human tongue. Indeed, that is one of the goals of the poet—to hear such voices and translate them as openly as possible.
One of Harold’s great discoveries for this festival was the poet Stephan ‘Steve’ Torre with his stunning book of new and selected poems Red Obsidian. Torre had flirted with what he calls “the wine and cheese circuit” when he was young, meeting poets such as Robert Bly, W.S. Merwin, James Wright and others populating the Big Sur cultural ecosystem during its heyday in the 1960s. Torre decided to step out of that rarefied world in order to raise children off-grid, working as a homesteader, prison counselor and salvage logger. His poems are studded with jaw-dropping lines, truly some of the most embodied poetry I’ve ever read—you can practically smell the sweat of hard work, the spice of early morning fields, the grease of machine bearings as he repairs yet another piece of heavy equipment to keep the farm running. Sound is another visceral component of Torre’s poems that leaps to life: the sawmill’s “head saw singing, / thunder of the carriage…” coupled with the poet’s usual recourse to the visual: “the glowing mountain of bone meal / against the blue sea— / salt lips of a motherless morning.” (“The Sinker: Navarro Journal”)
This is an elder of 84 who has earned his wrinkles, his bone-deep aches and pains, from a time most younger generations have already forgotten, when work meant pitting your body against the elements, not tapping endless hours at a keyboard. Nor does he sugarcoat the impact of our industry on the land, recalling a time “before the coast / road was oiled slick as another roll of film / and tanker diesels churned the milkshake yellow.” (“Those Mornings, Big Sur”) His long poem sequence “We Went Out to Make Hay,” which Torre read from at the festival all too briefly, is a revelation. At a time when we romanticize “living off the land,” it’s an ode to the sheer muscle, love and determination required to wrest a living from the Earth. The only other poet I can think of who writes such visceral, physical poetry is the late Peter Trower, another logger who worked on the west coast of the continent.
Paul Nelson has had a lifelong fascination with the poetics of Charles Olson and his “projective verse,” not a school of poetics I’m enamoured of, but from Nelson’s talks it’s clear he’s studied the craft intensely, his knowledge broad and deep. His poems are a living echo of the Beat era, with their long, loping lines, open spaces and stream-of-consciousness cultural references, the transcription of a particularly active mind on any given day. Nelson spoke of another Olson concept, the “saturation job,” where the poet seeks immersion in the “field” of the poem, analogously also the literal field of the Cascadia bioregion. In this context, “saturation” implies one’s willingness to remain rooted in a particular landscape, resisting industrial culture’s temptation to move continually in search of better economic opportunities.
Indeed, as Indigenous peoples have known, it can take decades of living in a place to begin to fully understand both its natural and its human landscapes and harmonize one’s own life with it. Having lived in the West Kootenay most of my life except for brief stints living and working in Alberta and the Fraser Valley, I can testify to the powerful bond this creates. Especially while working in Alberta as a young man, I often found myself aching deeply for the mountain landscape I grew up in. Living in one place as I have now for over 20 years in the north Slocan Valley, you begin to develop a deeper relationship with its birds and animals. You begin to see the souls in them, to “hear” their language, as when the den of coyotes near my house strikes up its keening chorus on a clear late winter night, “throating the song of the forest— / fluted, wild as an icy crag, / flawless ease / of ancient lore…” [3] You make an implicit contract with the deer who use your fir-sheltered yard as a daycare for their fawns. You share eagerly the news of chickadees and nuthatches excited by the first hints of spring in the still-chill air. I’ve even had them bring their babies to the seed feeder to proudly show them off to me.
I was invited to speak on both days, the first day on the theme of fire, the second on solar cycles, which I’ve written about on my Substack channel here. [4] I spoke about both the ecological and mythological aspects of the element of fire in all its manifestations, including solar. Fire has been worshipped by ancient cultures around the world for thousands of years, manifested as solar/fire gods and goddesses. Archaeologists are still excavating fire temples and altars in Iran dating back 2,500 years to the Zoroastrian religion. Fire is especially visceral for me due to my experiences during last summer’s wildfires in the Slocan Valley that led to the evacuation of friends and neighbours for more than three weeks. I read from my “Summer of Fire” sequence published in Blue Communion [5] on day one—premiering the video poem at the festival—and from the “Resurrecting the Sun” sequence on day two, from my current book, Pole Shift & Other Poems. [6] I hadn’t realized how the emotions of shock and grief were still lodged in my body from the fires until I read “Summer of Fire, Part 5” for the first time in public and nearly broke down. “The night of the Valhalla Park / inferno, I dropped to my knees / in the street, breath sucked / from my lungs…”
Sharon Thesen also spoke on the theme of fire from the perspective of the 2003 conflagration that caused Kelowna to be evacuated, recording her impressions in her collection of poems, The Good Bacteria, published in 2006. She and her husband had recently moved to the Okanagan from Vancouver; the houses in their subdivision were so new they weren’t on the fire map yet. She noted that there was also a close proximity of Mars to Earth at the time, a conjunction that has occurred again recently. She watched terrified as across Okanagan Lake a resort exploded and was burnt to ashes. Thesen described our environmental policies regarding fire as “a deep failure of the feminine that isn’t repaired by academic feminism.”
Before speaking about fire—that most ubiquitous element in the universe—I spoke of poetry itself as another vital element. I consider it a spiritual resource, a deep well of sustenance for the human spirit. I read poems daily the way some read their Bible, Qu’ran or Buddhist Sutras. Indian mystic Osho said “Poetry contains all: All that is divine, all that is beautiful, all that can take you to the transcendental, is contained in poetry.” I also quoted Dylan Thomas, who once said: “A good poem is a contribution to reality,” something we can surely use in these dire times.
I’ve always had a cosmopolitan interest in poetry, reading Russian, Japanese, German, Spanish and South American poets in translation. So it was exciting to learn from Vivek Sharma’s presentation, “Ghazals, Reimagined,” about this ancient Arabic poetic form in its original shape, which is quite different from the way it has been adapted in the West, similar to the way Japanese haiku has been altered by its Western cultural assimilation. The ghazal (pronounced “guh-zzle,” emphasis on first syllable) originated in 7th century Arabia and evolved as it moved to other places such as Persia, flourishing in the Urdu language. Unlike the West, where poetry is generally only of interest to academics and poets, in Arabic culture taxi drivers and even butchers will often quote ghazals from famous poets such as Agha Shahid Ali. Sharma said that E.E. Cummings’ famous line, “no one, not even the rain, has such small hands,” was inspired by an Arabic original. [7]
The original ghazal form is normally five to 15 couplets, structurally and thematically autonomous, yet with connecting threads throughout. Unlike the Western form it uses both rhymes and refrains, like song verses. As Kelly Shepherd explained in his preamble to his latest collection of Western ghazals, Dog and Moon, the late Robert Bly alludes to the spirit of the form in his book Leaping Poetry:
“In many ancient works of art we notice a long floating leap at the centre of the work. That leap can be described as a leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again.” —Robert Bly [8]
Bly discusses how this departs from the English tradition of more linear poetry. Harold Rhenisch wrote an entire book of similarly “leaping” ghazals with his Two Minds. [9] I’ve always needed something of a narrative through-line to poetry, so the Western ghazal sometimes leaves me cold, though Rhenisch creates some strikingly original images in his ghazals. Sharma said the ghazal in its pure form is actually an amatory (romantic) poem “performed in an overzealous manner with wine and music… and a lot of cheering and wah-wah-ing.” Agha Shahid Ali advocated for a strict formality in ghazals in his book Ravishing Disunities that attempted to correct western inaccuracies of form. Shepherd’s Dog and Moon is necessarily a Western adaptation, but the excerpts he read at Cascadia are sprinkled with nuggets of insight and wisdom that are instantly memorable. [10] Shepherd is a poet to watch, as I discovered when I read and reviewed his previous book, Shift.
Ecologist and author Don Gayton spoke about personal rituals he developed around a particular glacial erratic rock in a canyon he visits often. He can’t pronounce the Syilx name for it but has given it his own settler name, Touching Rock. Adults are often hesitant about participating in the touching ritual, but one group of kids climbed right on top of it, a “revelatory moment.”
“This rock has absolutely no significance except what I give it. I can ignore it or I can invest it with significance. Alexander Humboldt would say the qualities aren’t intrinsic to it, they’re all assigned by me. I know that rationally, but still persist with the ritual.” —Don Gayton
Gayton on day two spoke about the new scientific field of dendropyrochronology, the fire scars in tree rings that tell us the year and sometimes the season that fires occurred. The oldest cross-section was found near Cranbrook, with the first fire scar in 1489. The UBCO campus has a fire-scarred stump going back to 1658, with evidence of Indigenous cultural burning.
Christine McPhee, an MFA student at UBC Okanagan, read her Life Cycle poems, a work-in-progress inspired by the concept of “solastalgia,” a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at home, but the environment has changed. This is not the same as nostalgia, where we leave the past behind and occasionally revisit it. She cited a bluegrass musician who presented a PhD thesis explaining how these changes are affecting redwood species which are often used in the making of musical instruments. Therefore, the instruments of the future will sound different than today’s. Of course, this is already true of the difference between the prized violins made by Stradivarius in the 18th century and those made more recently, since forest ecosystems are always changing. To cite the classic Zen aphorism, “you can’t step in the same river twice.”
Amy Wang, another MFA student at UBC, explained her thesis regarding the concept of palimpsest. We now tend to think of this in the sense of an urban landscape, an admixture of the old and the new—heritage buildings sprinkled among new, modern ones. Wang explained that in its original form the term referred to the copying by hand of manuscripts prior to the advent of the printing press. Because the vellum or other writing materials were precious and expensive, they were often reused by scraping off the original text and writing over it. Yet traces of the original remain.
“Just because the layers are on top of one another they’re not negating one another,” said Wang. “Some of the past still shows up in the present, peeking up through the layer of the present. You think they’re behind you but they’re not.”
As a personal exploration she returned to her elementary school and family home in Vancouver to see what had changed, what had been removed or layered over. Wang is in some respects exploring the consciousness of the historian, who is constantly intrigued by the palimpsest of the past and seeking to untangle it.
During Steve Torre’s reading from Red Obsidian on day two, he mentioned that he’s accomplished far more in his life as a prison counselor than he ever did as a poet. This was a quality I immediately admired in Torre, his grounded, no-bullshit attitude. He cited W.H. Auden’s famous dictum that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Paul Nelson interjected to point out that this oft-repeated quotation is taken out of context, and provided the balance of the verse from Auden’s poem “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”:
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.
Note how Auden twice repeats that poetry “survives,” a vital force that has proven its relevance to human flourishing for millennia. It is “a way of happening” that is distinct from power politics, yet also informs it by reminding people of values that transcend the political imperatives of the historical moment. In short, we’re back to what I earlier described as poetry’s spiritual value and power, a “valley” or sanctuary of spirit the mere politician or executive “would never want to tamper…” because they can’t speak its language.
Thankfully, there are those who do speak the language of poetry, and indeed, for most of the human race, those who benefit by it. The late great Lawrence Ferlinghetti said that “poetry is the shortest distance between two humans,” that “a poem should arise to ecstasy somewhere between speech and song.” [11] In his vital little book, Poetry as Insurgent Art, he also urged poets to avoid self-absorption in abstruse, opaque theories of poetics and aim to communicate viscerally with the reader or listener. “If you would be a poet, discover a new way for mortals to inhabit the earth.” [12] A tall order, to be sure. But the poets and writers at Cascadia Poetry Festival aimed high in hopes their words will help connect others to this incredible network of ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest. As Romantic poet Robert Browning once said: “A man’s reach must exceed his grasp or what’s a heaven for?”
Full list of Cascadia 2025 presenters:
Vivek Sharma • Nepal
Soha Aftab • India
Slava Bart • Kazakhstan
Michelle Poirier Brown • Vernon
Emma Carey • Kelowna
Don Gayton • Summerland
Sean Arthur Joyce • New Denver
Christine McPhee • Penticton
Cole Mash • Kelowna
Lorin Medley • Comox
Jeanette Merrick • Summerland
Astrida Neimanis • Kelowna
Paul Nelson • Seattle
Francisco Peña • Kelowna
Harold Rhenisch • Canim Bay
Erin Scott • Kelowna
Kelly Shepherd • Edmonton
Sharon Thesen • Lake Country
Stephan Torre • Saltspring
Amy Wang • Kelowna
[1] “On Bioregional Boundaries: David McCloskey,” Cascadia Department of Bioregion: https://cascadiabioregion.org/department-of-bioregion/on-bioregional-boundaries-david-mccloskey
[2] Harold Rhenisch, The Salmon Shanties: A Cascadian Song Cycle (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2024), p. 2.
[3] Sean Arthur Joyce, “Coyotes on the Edge of Town, Part 1,” Pole Shift & Other Poems (Victoria BC: Ekstasis Editions, 2024), p. 71.
[4] See my three-part series, “Here Comes the Sun” at Substack: https://seanarthurjoyce.substack.com/p/here-comes-the-sun-part-1 https://seanarthurjoyce.substack.com/p/here-comes-the-sun-part-2 https://seanarthurjoyce.substack.com/p/here-comes-the-sun-part-3
[5] Sean Arthur Joyce, Blue Communion (Victoria BC: Ekstasis Editions, 2023), pp. 17–22.
[6] Sean Arthur Joyce, Pole Shift & Other Poems (Victoria BC: Ekstasis Editions, 2024), pp. 47–49.
[7] A brief explanation and examples are found at The Poetry Foundation website: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/education/glossary/ghazal
[8] Robert Bly, Leaping Poetry: An Idea with Poems and Translations (Boston: Beacon Press / A Seventies Press Book, 1972; 1975 ed.), p. 1.
[9] Harold Rhenisch, Two Minds (Calgary: Frontenac Press, 2015).
[10] Kelly Shepherd, Dog and Moon (Regina: University of Regina Press, 2025): https://uofrpress.ca/Books/D/Dog-and-Moon
[11] Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poetry as Insurgent Art (New York: New Directions, 1975; 2007 ed.), pp. 40, 44.
[12] Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Poetry as Insurgent Art (New York: New Directions, 1975; 2007 ed.), p. 6.
Really enjoyed this…felt like I was there. Interesting speakers and their poetry was unique and versatile. POETRY LONG MAY IT LIVE….