From Greg Bem:
Paul Nelson’s ongoing honing of the Day Song poetry event has produced some of the most lively and consequential verse of our time. How else write about the calamities and demands and mental/emotional/political consequences of the materialist apocalypse upon us, than an ongoing poesis of awareness and participation the anti-form the Day Song provides? Truly a praxis of proprioception and of Olson’s demand to “keep it moving…”
— Sharon Thesen
The Singing Bullets of Soft Secession: & Other DaySongs is a complication of 5 day-long writing ritual poems, DaySongs.
The daysong, a poem written in a 24 hour period (or the 16 or so hours you’re awake during a 24 hour period) was originally envisioned as an attempt to broaden the compositional range of the postcard poet, from the 12-14 lines that can fit onto a postcard to the 10-119 pages that can be written in a day. (119 if you’re Bernadette Mayer writing Midwinter Day.) The exercise was offered to participants in the Life as Rehearsal for the Poem workshop and then to participants in the 2022 Poetry Postcard Fest. It was based on Mayer’s experiment and the “Canto Diurno” of Pierre Joris.
See: https://paulenelson.com/daysong/
The range (compositional and logopoetic) of a poet is a telltale sign into the depth and breadth of their consciousness and the daysong is part test, part ritual, part vision quest. Done properly, it is a dharma gate and is evidence of a particular dharma position. It is an occasion of experience unlike many artistic pursuits.
Poet/interviewer Paul E. Nelson is the son of a labor activist father and Cuban immigrant mother. He founded the Cascadia Poetics Lab & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Books include DaySong Miracle (Past 62); Cascadian Prophets (Interviews 1999-2023); Haibun de la Serna; A Time Before Slaughter/Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia; American Sentences. Co-editor of several anthologies. Shortlisted for a 2010 Genius Award in Literature from The Stranger, awarded a residency at The Lake in 2012, by the Morris Graves Foundation and in 2026, a Fellowship at the Clyfford Still Museum Institute. He is Literary Executor for Sam Hamill.