Dear SICA-USA Fans,

I’ve been on the SICA-USA Board for over a year and in that time we’ve managed to have a blog post go out every week but one. (I was camping!) We’ve put this gorgeous new website online and the board has added new members and fresh ideas. This is all due to the leadership of Hamilton Cheifetz, who has weathered the lean SICA-USA years and guided us here.

Now I have something personal to announce and while I have reservations about patting myself on the back, a project which started unofficially in 1996 will be celebrated on Saturday, April 11, 2020, with a Zoom launch rather than an in-person affair which we had planned months ago and can’t stage due to the shelter-in-place guidelines to halt the spread of the novel Coronavirus, COVID-19. Here is my promotional postcard for that canceled event:

The book is A Time Before Slaughter, in an expanded tenth anniversary edition, adding the book Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia. Slaughter is the original name of Auburn, Washington, a town south of Seattle that I lived in for 17 years, six months and two days. The Pig War was a boundary dispute between the U.S. and England in the 19th century in this part of the world, the Cascadia bioregion, was settled without bloodshed (except for one pig) and established the boundaries of the San Juan Islands as U.S. territory. They could have been part of Canada.

The book was inspired more than anything else, by the mid-20th century books that re-enact the history of small town USAmerica to tell the story of American history: William Carlos Williams Paterson, Charles Olson’s The Maximus Poems and Diane di Prima’s Loba, though the history of her poem is not the main thrust. So, it is a serial poem which enacts the history of the Cascadia bioregion in experimental and sometimes neo-baroque verse. And it swings! And there is humor!

And the new introduction to the book’s expanded content is entitled:

K/not K/no(w)etics: Paul Nelson’s poetic latihan

In that introduction, Matt Trease says:

The book is available online. Click here.

I would love to see you at the Zoom launch Saturday, April 11, 2020, at 7pm.

Meeting ID: 206 422 5002 (my phone number.)

Huge thanks to my Subud sisters and brothers and my SICA-USA Board Members.