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PAUL E NELSON

Cascadia Poetry Festival 8 Paul E Nelson at the microphone

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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RIP Bridget A. Nutting

Sad to report that one of the longtime August Poetry Postcard Fest participants, Bridget Nutting of Vancouver, Washington, died yesterday, Sunday, October 9, 2016. From her son Josh: On Sunday...

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Blue River Writers Gathering 2016

So much to share with the preparations for the 4th Cascadia Poetry Festival Nov 3-6, with the last day of our fundraising campaign to install a modest plaque to honor the memory of Denise Levertov...

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Cascadia IV (I Did Not Build That)

I'm thinking of the controversy from an event during the 2012 U.S. Presidential campaign. It's the You Didn't Build That notion and was the response by less conscious people about the nature of how...

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Deborah Poe

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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Deborah Poe on "flagging the apocalypse pageantry"

by Paul E Nelson