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
FLEXIBLE MIND THIS CLOUD IS A LIFE
I have been fortunate to facilitate online workshops since Fall 2020. It is one of the great personal developments of the pandemic restructuring that we're experiencing right now and, of course, if...
Michael McClure Archives Simon Fraser University
On Friday, November 12, 2021, Adelia MacWilliam and I visited the W.A.C. Bennett Special Collections Library at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, B.C. to investigate the extensive Michael McClure...
RIP Pat Martino (Observer of environment, including guitar)
Thirteen months ago I started facilitating workshops again and I never knew how much joy and inspiration could come from engaging people at a deep level via Zoom poetry workshops. And before I get...
Beat Breath for EBSN
I am delighted to continue my association with the European Beat Studies Network again this Sunday, as part of their 2021 Zoom conference. I am also delighted to present on the topic of Beat Breath...
Seriality (A 2022 Workshop:
In this workshop we take the methods and the organismic stance toward poetics (& life) and continue to investigate how to deepen one’s own work and life through spontaneous writing, rituals,...
Notes for American Sentences Talk to Haiku Koma Kulshan
Thanks to C.J. Prince and John Green of Haiku Koma Kulshan, I was invited to give a talk about American Sentences on Saturday, October 9, 2021 via Zoom to their Haiku group. I was given some topics...
American Sentences Talk
The second edition of my book of 17 syllable poems, American Sentences, was published in time for my 60th birthday party on September 22, 2021. Saturday, I'll have a chance to talk about the form,...
60th Birthday Interview of Paul E Nelson by Greg E Bem
Over the last few years there has been no one more active at reviewing my work and bringing exposure to it than Greg Bem. He is the P.R. guy you'd kill for, with video and audio editing skills and a...
100 Thousand Poets for Change
I'm delighted to be part of an event which has been happening for many years, organized and conceived of by Michael Rothenberg. 100 Thousand Poets for Change is the event, one for which I helped...
1st Podcast Robert Lashley
I have been asked many times: "Do you have a podcast?" Now, I can say "yes." Via the non-profit I founded in 1993, now known as the Cascadia Poetics LAB, we have launched Cascadian Prophets....
Imbolc 2025 Dharma Position Daysong
I feel very fortunate to have successfully navigated another daysong, a day-long poem writing ritual. I set aside Imbolc 2025 to write, as that pagan holiday (& celebration of return of the...
Anne Tardos The Always Already Absent Present
What a joy to interview Anne Tardos about her new book The Always Already Absent Present. The audio is online thanks to Zach Charles and here is the video, recorded March 4, 2025. My introduction:...
Stephan Torre
One of the great joys in participating in the recent Cascadia: A Braided Land event at UBCO was meeting 84 year old Northern Cascadia poet Stephan Torre. With roots in Big Sur back in the days...
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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