From Greg Bem in Spokane, WA:

Daysong Miracle (Past 62)

This is the third of four “DaySongs” Seattle poet Paul E. Nelson has completed. The ritual was designed for workshop participants in online Zoom courses he has been conducting since the Covid-19 pandemic lockdown. They’re currently run under the names “Poetics as Cosmology” and “Life as Rehearsal for the Poem.” The DaySong comes mainly out of projects by Bernadette Mayer (Midwinter Day) and The “Canto Diurno” of Pierre Joris.

The DaySong exercise is only possible writing projectively and is a test of a poet’s ability to write in the method Charles Olson, in part described as a “use of speech at its least careless and least logical.” It also incorporates a notion that the late BC poet Barry McKinnon ascribed to William Carlos Williams, that each poem you write should be a summary of your life to that point. Having three long-time friends die at age 62 in 2022/2023 and writing the DaySong two weeks before Nelson was to turn 62 was part of the energy that propelled this poem.

Poet/interviewer Paul E. Nelson founded the Cascadia Poetics LAB & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Books include Haibun de la Serna (2022), A Time Before Slaughter/Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia (2020) American Prophets (interviews 1994-2012) (2018) & American Sentences (2015, 2021). Co-Editor of Cascadian Zen Volume I: Bioregional Writings on Cascadia Here and Now (2023, Watershed Press), Make it True meets Medusario (2019) (Spanish & English) and other anthologies. He’s Literary Executor for the late poet Sam Hamill and lives in Rainier Beach, alongside dxʷwuqʷed Creek.

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What a pleasure to work with Greg Bem and Roberta Hoffman. My deep thanks go to them.