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PAUL E NELSON

Back in March before we had a sense of how COVID-19 the novel Coronavirus would change our lives forever, Rattle Magazine’s Tim Green invited me to sit down (via Skype) for an interview about my work, my projects and about POPO. It is the best interview anyone has ever done with me and as an interviewer myself, I am rather picky about these things. He did his homework, followed threads that he found interesting and just yesterday engaged me via Skype again to have me read some of my poems to add them to the recording. The information is below as Rattle Magazine has presented it. I’d welcome your thoughts and, if you like what I say, or find it interesting, consider picking up a copy of the summer edition of Rattle #68 which just happens to have a feature on postcard poems. You can watch it here:

Rattlecast #54 will air at the regular time, but will not be live. This pre-recorded episode features Paul E. Nelson’s interview for our summer issue, conducted in March, bookended by a more recent reading of some of his poems. As such, there is no opportunity for audience questions or an open mic, but we hope you still enjoy watching this episode together.

The full transcript of his interview appears in Rattle #68:
https://www.rattle.com/i68/

Paul E. Nelson is the founder of SPLAB (Seattle Poetics LAB) and the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Since 1993, SPLAB has produced hundreds of poetry events and 600 hours of interview programming with legendary poets and whole systems activists including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, and many others. Paul’s books include American Prophets: Interviews 1994–2012 (2018), American Sentences (2015), A Time Before Slaughter (2009) and Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies (2013). He has had work translated into Spanish, Chinese, and Portuguese, and writes an American sentence every day. Winner of the 2014 Robin Blaser Award from The Capilano Review, he is engaged in a twenty-year bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia and lives in Rainier Beach, in the Cascadia bioregion’s Cedar River watershed.