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
Hoarse #5 Release Party
I will be reading: HOARSE When Sunday, December 18, 2011 Time 7:00pm until 12:00am Where The Snug Room @ College Inn Pub, 4006 University Way NE, Seattle, WA Description The 5th release of HOARSE is...
Seattle’s Poetry Scene
Seattle’s Poetry Scene Seattle likes to pride itself on being one of America’s Most Literate Cities. I pay attention to these annual pronouncements for about 2 minutes when they inevitably make the...
Brenda Hillman Interview
Brenda Hillman finished off the SPLAB 2011 Visiting Poets Series in fine fashion November 11 and 12 with a brilliant talk on Innovation and Activism in Poetry Friday the 11th (Veterans Day), a...
American Prophets
Paul Nelson first started conducting interviews in his early radio days, Chicago 1980. In 1990 he was promoted to News & Community Affairs Director of KKNW (106.9 in Seattle) and over the next...
Jargon 20: Passage (by Michael McClure)
I checked mail yesterday and Michael McClure’s package came. It was an original copy of Jargon 20: Passage, published in 1956 by Jonathan Williams. I immediately sat down and read the whole book...
SPLAB Visiting Poet Brenda Hillman Details & Audio
Talk, Friday, November 11, 7:30P at SPLAB Workshop, Saturday, November 12, 1-4P @ SPLAB Reading Saturday, Nov 12 at 7:30P @ SPLAB Brenda Hillman I...
Black Holes and Virgos on Flute: New Jim O’Halloran CD
Review of Jim O’Halloran Quintet CD Jazz music has gone through four major changes in its century-plus time of existence. Ragtime and Dixieland gave way to Swing, to Bebop and then to Free Jazz....
Swell (the novel) (Reading 11.4.117P)
Paul Nelson reads with Jim O'Halloran on flute and with novelist Corwin Ericson, who is touring Swell in the Northwest! November 4, 2011, 7P. Mark your calendars for the Seattle book release party...
Paul E Nelson
To what do you train your attention? For over 30 years, Paul E Nelson has interviewed poetic luminaries such as Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Anne Waldman, Robin Blaser, Sam Hamill, Wanda...
Annual Bradner Gardens Concert
On August 18, 2018, from 6:30 to 8:30pm, I will again participate in what is becoming like a ritual for me, reading poems with Jim O'Halloran's band at perhaps the best community garden in the city,...
Elegy for Tahlequah’s Calf
A recent poem of mine was published in Cascadia Magazine. It is dedicated to the "Father of Cascadia" who suggested someone write a poem about this tragic incident. Thank you David McCloskey and...
Notes on A Sense of the Whole (Reading Mark Gonnerman Reading Gary Snyder)
Mark Gonnerman was a participant in SPLAB's Becoming Cascadian retreat last spring. In 1997 he organized a yearlong research workshop on Gary Snyder's long poem Mountains and Rivers Without End....
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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