Washington Poetic Routes

As a part of her tenure as Washington State Poet Laureate, Claudia Castro Luna has created Washington Poetic Routes, “a digital poetry-mapping project that explores Washington’s rich geographical terrain, both in terms of landscape and in terms of the human relationships that unfold across the State.”

At the Washington Poetic Routes website, each clickable red dot on the map marks a site-specific poem. I’m honored that my poem, dropping down the west side of the cascades (see below), is included at Stevens Pass.

As an unexpected bonus, Claudia Castro Luna just notified me that my poem will be one of eight selected from the WPR project to be made into a broadside. The selected poems will be hand-printed by a team of eight printers at the Seattle School of Visual Concepts, each printer working with one poem. The poems will then be assembled into 50 portfolios that will go to Humanities Washington, which supports the Washington State Poet Laureate program and is covering production costs. The broadsides should be complete in early 2020.

dropping down the west side of the cascades

this is it.
the smell of green
of damp rot, of slugs and ferns
and staggering grand trees.
the smell of festering tidal flats
the burst of orcas through
a rain-matted sea.
the smell of gulls and sea lions
salmon and cedar longhouses.
of pulp mills and seattle traffic
shrouded and mysterious islands
and miles and miles and miles
of raw ocean.