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
The Cafe Review, Portland, ME, Spr. ’12
I was fortunate enough to have some poems published in the latest edition of The Cafe Review out of Portland, Maine. There are some other very fine poets published in this edition. See: They...
Harvest The Arts, Mother’s Day in Mt. Baker
I performed with Jim O'Halloran (flute), Greg Powers (tuba) and Michael Nicolella (guitar) yesterday on a Mother's Day program at the Mount Baker Community Clubhouse. The new Poet Laureate Kathleen...
60. Hymn to Indian Plum
60. Hymn to Indian Plum (pdf)
54. Black Dragon Year
54. Black Dragon Year (see 54. Black Dragon Year for proper lineation) The heart measures in blood everything that happens. – Ramón Gomez de la Serna The dragon stays stuck to lampposts at the...
HARVEST THE ARTS! Mother’s Day Edition :: JAZZ & POETRY
2811 Mount Rainier Drive South Seattle, WA 98144 (206) 722-7209 3:30pm, Mother's Day, Sunday, May 20, 2012 Donations Graciously Accepted. Refreshments Provided.A collaborative program of poetry,...
Paul Nelson Interviewed by Steve Barker
My gratitude for Steve Barker for taking time to look over my websites and conduct an intelligent interview about my poetry, about SPLAB and some interviews that I have conducted over the years....
More 2012 American Sentences
OK, more harvesting done today and some news. Pablo Baler in his fascinating project The Next Thing: art in the 21st Century has a great end note to the word Greguería. It reads: 1. Greguería is...
Igniting the Galaxies: Cascadian Ecopoetry
Igniting the Galaxies: Cascadian Ecopoetry (A review of Igniting the Green Fuse: Four Canadian Women Poets) (download as a pdf) One of the great delights in organizing the recent Cascadia Poetry...
Intro to Reissue of McClure’s Specks
It was on my 50th birthday that I received an email from Garry Thomas Morse of Talon Books in Vancouver asking if I would be interested in writing the introduction to a reissue of Michael McClure's...
Before Pigs
The opening poem from my current project: Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia. Text, with linebreaks fouled up by Wordpress, is here: https://paulenelson.com/pig-war/before-pigs/
#SPLAB@25
The non-profit organization I founded on December 14, 1993 turns 25 tomorrow and we are going to celebrate. SPLAB started as It Plays in Peoria Productions and had a mission of creating radio...
One Mind (Impersonal)
The launch of AmericanProphets, my book of transcribed interviews mostly taken from the years of the syndicated radio show I hosted and produced between 1993 and 2004, has been not only a cathartic...
Unconventional Nelson
10.20.2018 - I told the UPS clerk my Mom’s first name was unconventional. #AmericanSentences When Bhakti and I were in Chicago last September, my Ma, Lesbia Nelson, was having lower back pain and so...
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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