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.
Ian Boyden Interview (A Forest of Names)
They are 108 poems that “illuminate a hidden landscape in the names of children killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.” Many of their deaths could have been prevented if not for the shoddy...
A Fly Landed
I missed out on Rattle's Poets Respond AGAIN!
The Art of the Blurb
I have been asked on occasion to write blurbs for friends and acquaintances and, like any other form of writing, it takes some practice. The first thing is to learn what NOT to blurb. Really, if it...
POPO Birthday Bounty
I'm a little stunned by the amount of birthday wishes I am getting for my 59th and it seems a perfect day to share THE CARDS I GOT. Each year I create a photo or video of postcards I have received...
COVID-19 Sonnet
Since the beginning of 2019 I have been writing "prose sonnets" Matt Trease calls them. 14 line prose poems often with an epigraph and sometimes three. I saw the form first in the work of Jack...
Article on American Sentences
Huge thanks (again) to Tim Green of Rattle Magazine who wrote about my practice of American Sentences for The Press-Enterprise in Riverside, California. The article is called: I love how Tim changes...
9.11.2020 American Sentence
9.11.2020 - He's at the boat launch pier, w/ rod & reel, fishing for smoked salmon....
PEN POPO2020 Afterword (Postcards from the Pandemic)
In years past I have taken time on the 1st of September to write my POPO afterword. If felt like a ritual to end each extended August with a meditation on what I had done, followed by a photo or...
Iris Cushing on David Henderson and Mary Norbert Körte
Interview with Iris Cushing on The First Books of David Henderson & Mary Korte: A Research. Recorded via Zoom, Sunday, September 6, 2020, at 1pm PDT. In 1967, the first books of two poets were...
Prostate Cancer Update
I was asked by my local spiritual community, Subud Greater Seattle, for an update on my treatment for prostate cancer. An excerpt: I was diagnosed with prostate cancer on February 17, 2020 and had...
Happy 92nd Michael McClure
Michael McClure would have turned 92 Sunday, October 20, 2024. His book: Touching the Edge: Dharma Devotions from the Hummingbird Sangha may be the best Zen poetry written in English. It has...
Two Readings, Downtown Library, Jack Straw
I'm delighted to be part of two important poetry readings in the next few days. Saturday, October 19, 2-4pm, Microsoft Auditorium, Seattle Central Library, 1000 4th Avenue: TAKE A STAND: Poets...
Paul Reads at Jack Straw Oct 21 7pm
I'm delighted to have been invited to read as part of the Jack Straw Writers Program reading Monday, October 21, 2024 at 7pm. Other poets include John Burgess, Bill Carty, Denise Michaels, Susan...
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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