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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Ontological Kinesiology in Puebla
It was quite a melange of cultures in Puebla during the 14th Subud World Congress August 1-17, 2014. (See my previous posts here and here.) To give you some sense of how diverse the event was, these...
476. Logic of Ordnance
This poem continues from the last postcard poem and Levertov's notion of the acts that serve as counterstrokes to the ills of the world. She would have been writing about WWII, a war in which she...
475. Counterstroke
As with all 2014 August Poetry Postcard Fest poems, this one uses Levertov again as the source of its epigraph and the poem continues the theme of that quote and it weaves through familiar...
The interview I conducted with Sam O’Hana, a Ph.D. student at CUNY, is immensely critical and immensely validating for the work we do at the Cascadia Poetics Lab. At its core, the discussion is about whether writing is for people of means, or if it can be people who have skill and something to say. It means the literary gatekeepers have failed us and have a role in perpetuating neoliberalism in North America which has paved the way for authoritarianism. The interview is available as a podcast here and as a YouTube video here. Below, I have pasted in the transcript and here is my introduction to Sam O’Hana and his topic.