“Over the past decade or so, no one has done more for poetry in the Pacific Northwest than has Paul Nelson.”– Sam Hamill

Ricardo Ruiz (We Had Our Reasons)

by Paul E. Nelson

​“I am a warrior, so that my son may be a merchant, so that his son may be a poet.” A quote attributed to John Quincy Adams, though it is quite possible that is a paraphrase. To go from being a gang-banger in Othello, Washington, to a bigger gang called the U.S. Army, almost dying three times in the theater of war, to find himself as a poet, interviewing undocumented people and telling their stories in lyric verse in Spanish and English. This is the story of Ricardo Ruiz and it’s told in his debut book: We Had Our Reasons or Teníamos Nuestras Razones in his lengua materna.

Pierre Joris Interview from 2022

by Paul E. Nelson

A 2022 interview with Pierre Joris on his long poem Canto Diurno #1. That 1986 poem is a very ambitious effort to make a poem “as large as I / could make it.” That he’d call it a “canto” is evocative of Ezra Pound. Pierre Joris was born on Bastille Day in 1946 in Strasbourg, France, and raised in Luxembourg. He’s moved between the US, Europe & North Africa for 55 years, published more than 50 books of poetry, essays, anthologies, plays & translations. His translations of the poetry of Paul Celan are a tremendous gift to world literature, as are his collaborations with Jerome Rothenberg on editing the anthology Poems for the Millennium, Volumes I & II. Pierre. This interview was recorded on May 2, 2022.