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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525. Momentary Cultivation
An August Poetry Postcard from 2015 featuring yet another photo of mine from 2014, this one from the Skokomish Rez, I love the allusion to the American Indian Movement and hope President Obama will...
HRC and the Death of the Onion
I've loved the Onion for years and can remember almost wetting myself at the biting humor of some of the stories. (One on Ozzie Guillen comes to mind.) Dark, un-PC and probably the best thing going...
Hummingbird Resuscitation
I like to think of it as a good sign in my life when critters are waiting until I pass by to drop from the sky in need of a little aid. Fortunately this recent experience was only a hummingbird, but...
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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