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PAUL E NELSON

I am grateful to 4Culture and the Des Moines Arts Commission for the support of three free workshops next month. Poetics as Cosmology is the title of a workshop I have been facilitating online for three years. I gave a talk of the same name in March of 2022 in which I said:

How is writing a poem (or making any piece of art) like how you can live your life? What capacity do you have for Negative Capability? Gelassenheit? The Great Doubt of Zen and the nihility of Keiji Nishitani?

In other words:

1) How can the ego part of you be surrendered to the higher self and
2) How is the act of listening to the syllables as they occur to you in your own head and arranging them on a page as best replicates that activity a deepening of one’s own perception that can be applied to other activities in one’s life? Can it be a way of living? What is its relation to proprioception?

I hope to see you in Des Moines at their beautiful events campus on Puget Sound. Note that the Nov 20 workshop will be online. To register for these workshops, send an email to pen@cascadiapoeticslab.org

Poetics as Cosmology in Des Moines