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 Poetry Culture & Chinese Culture Xi Chuan
Xi Chuan gave a stellar reading at the Seattle Central library on Monday, January 9, 2012. Chris Higashi was a gracious host and Paul Manfredi a fine reader of Xi Chuan's work in English,...
49th Parallel Blues
See me read it with Jim O'Halloran on flute: https://www.facebook.com/paul.nelson/posts/165440583559985 Line breaks here are not right, but what the hell? It's #49 in a series of 99 haibun inspired...
Poet Politician: The Work of Jidi Majia
It is awkward to write on this day that my country’s President, for whom I wept on Election Day 2008, is signing into law a bill which allows any U.S. President to label someone a terrorist, eroding...
2nd Half of 2011 American Sentences
There are still two more sentences for me to write & complete eleven years of the daily practice of writing one American Sentence every day since January 1, 2001. To read more in this form, see:...
Post on Pacific Rim Poetics
For some reason, I did not get my Pacific Rim Poetics essay transferred over from OrganicPoetry.org to this here site. Today I corrected that. Here are the two epigraphs: If I open a magazine of...
American Sentences from 2011
I have begun harvesting my American Sentences from this past year. It's always a blast from my recent past to do this and this is eleven years now of writing one of these 17 syllable poems every...
From Pablo Baler The Next Thing: Art in the 21st Century
Dear Paul: I want to keep you in the loop of an Art Book/World-class Anthology worth your attention and support. The title is: THE NEXT THING: ART IN THE 21st CENTURY and it brings together a...
Sam Hamill on Why Poetry Matters
I re-posted this interview on this website and it's gotten about 200 hits and will be translated into Spanish by Hamill's translator, Esteban Moore. An excerpt: The editor of Copper Canyon Press for...
Organic Poetry Essays
I've been migrating my Org Po essays from OrganicPoetry.org to this site. This was the introductory page to the essays on that site. Comments are welcome. A book is coming out in 2012 from...
How George Bowering Writes Books
I never get tired of George Bowering. Some people say writing about writing is boring. They're usually right, but Bowering's writing on writing is fascinating. Take this bit excerpted from his new...
Six Postcards
Bhakti and I got back from an overnight sojourn to THE MULTIVERSE on San Juan Island yesterday. We went to the community/arts spot Ian, Jennifer and Gavia Boyden have created to showcase art and...
Kozer on Seriality
In the car we listen to music almost exclusively on the old Ipod, which has remnants of the previous user's musical tastes. (Thanks Rebecca!) Were it to be passed down again, and were the new owner...
Wanda Coleman (Soap Opera Writing and Editor’s Mind)
Thinking of spontaneous composition during the 12th August POetry POstcard Fest while editing a Wanda Coleman interview from Fall 2000. She was one of our favorite visitors to the NW SPokenword LAB,...
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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