Paul E Nelson presenting at Cascadia Poetry Festival 8, photo by Leszek Chudzinski
“Paul formally received the Mahayana precepts of Zen Buddhism in 2023, becoming a lay practitioner within the tradition, but I believe he had long lived in accord with them. His poetry, in its sensitivity, its humility, and its deep listening, embodies practice-realization — the understanding that practice and awakening are not separate. His writing was his zazen. This collection, FLEXIBLE MIND, is more than a book. It is a continuation of that practice. A testament to a man who lives by attention, who bows to language but does not cling to it, who seeks what lays beyond words by walking straight into them.”– Kosho Itagaki, Soto Zen Priest
American Sentences Handout
This site has been getting a lot of hits from people who heard about American Sentences via Kim Addonizio and her book Ordinary Genius which mentions the form and reference to the website...
78. Wren and Whale Surrender
78 in a series of 99 neo-barroco haibun written after Ramón Gomez de la Serna. This one inspired by E. Richard Atleo's book Tsawalk: A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview. The holistic way of thinking seems to...
77. Clean Shirt (It Never Entered My Mind)
Mississippi – Yangtze Sister Rivers (Wang Ping, Kinship of Rivers)
Kinship of Rivers is an international project engaging art, poetry, stories, music, dance and food to connect people and communities along the Mississippi and Yangtze Rivers. Founded in 2011 by Wang...
Happy 84th Pop
My Dad, Paul Everett Nelson Senior, is 84 today, December 27, 2012. A few years ago I wrote a haibun that started as one of my reminiscences of a couple of our early experiences at Comiskey Park,...
Voluntary Simplicity – Cecile Andrews
Cecile Andrews, former columnist for the Seattle Times and expert on Voluntary Simplicity is author of: The Circle of Simplicity: Return to the Good Life. She discussed the concept of Voluntary...
USAmerica’s Overworking Epidemic (Take Back Your Time)
John de Graaf is a documentary filmmaker for PBS. He discussed what he calls the epidemic of overworking in America, how Western Europeans get more leisure time and vacations, as well as his effort...
Richard Atleo – Tsawalk A Nuu-chah-nulth Worldview
E. Richard Atleo, whose Nuu-chah-nulth name is Umeek, is a hereditary chief. He served as co-chair of the internationally recognized Scientific Panel for Sustainable Forest Practices in Claoquot...
Thom Hartmann – Corporate Personhood (The Theft of Human Rights)
Thom Hartmann is an international relief worker, psychotherapist, father and author of over a dozen books, including: Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance & the Theft of Human...
The Indigenous Perspective on the “Mayan Apocalypse”
One of the great amusements in life is to watch how settlers (& their descendants who have not evolved their thinking) continue to view world events through their own cultural filters and then...
#APPF13 Wrapup (What I Wrote)
It seems rather overwhelming to summarize my experience as a participant of the 13th August Poetry Postcard Fest which longtime participant Terry Holzman a few years ago nicknamed PoPo and an...
The Joy of Postcards (Aug 2019 Reviews)
I titled my APPF essay for Rattle "The Joy of Postcards" but even though I was likening this activity to the subject of a famous book from the 60s, I was not far off based on some feedback from some...
Deborah Poe Interview (June 30, 2019)
Deborah Poe is the author of the poetry collections keep (from Dusie Press), the last will be stone, too (Stockport Flats), Elements (Stockport Flats), and Our Parenthetical Ontology (CustomWords),...
How does one make literary art about this time in history that avoids rhetoric and facile political positioning in this era of the spectacle? How does one avoid being consumed by the simultaneous collapse of so many systems — some being eviscerated by people in positions designed to protect such systems? Deborah Poe has some idea based on her submission to the upcoming anthology Winter in America (Still.
Deborah is the author of several books of poetry including keep, Elements, and Our Parenthetical Ontology, as well as a novella in verse, Hélène. Her visual works–video poems and handmade book objects–have been exhibited throughout the US. She lives on stolen Coast Salish land, specifically the ancestral homeland of the Duwamish, Suquamish, Stillaguamish, and Muckleshoot People.
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