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
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Footsteps Anthology Benefits Homeless Vets
Thanks to the tirelessness and vision of Doug Johnson, Footsteps, a poetry anthology to benefit Homeless Vets, which I co-edited, is being released tonight and there will be a candlelight vigil in...
Post-Election Blues
Two poems (or a poem and an excerpt) and a bunch of graphics come to mind today as I help friends deal with what they see as catastrophic election results. I am an optimistic person, so I can...
Post-Fest Thoughts
There are about a thousand things I could write about the recently concluded Cascadia Poetry Festival. That John Olson could step in with only a few hours notice to read on the Main Stage was a...
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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