Paul E Nelson presenting at Cascadia Poetry Festival 8, photo by Leszek Chudzinski
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, Cascadian Poet/Scholar from B.C.
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...
Rob Lewis and The Silence of Vanishing Things
Is a planetary ecological collapse underway? Yep. Does anyone care? At least Rob Lewis does. He wrote a book of poems and essays about the climate crisis and suggests that a shift away from...
Some End/West Broadway Bowering/Stanley Book Launch
I got this in the mail last week from New Star Books of Vancouver, BC: Actually, it was addressed from Point Roberts, WA, a little strip of land, a peninsula actually, south of the 49th parallel,...
Bay Area Postcard Readings!
The launch of 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards, an anthology that was ten years in the making is finally happening in the Bay Area THIS WEEKEND! Ina Roy-Faderman has worked tirelessly to help...
In Honor of David McCloskey “The Father of Cascadia”
David McCloskey passed away on July 3. In honor of his lifetime of work to create and spread a culture that was deeply connected to the Cascadian bioregion, Cascadian Prophets, which owes more than just its name to his work, we want to share this interview from October, 2013. Find it transcribed on our website.
To listen to the original audio of this interview, click here.
Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website.
In Honor of David McCloskey "The Father of Cascadia"
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.
Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website.
To get original poetry right in your mailbox this summer, check out the Poetry Postcard Fest.