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
The Poetry Foundation
Dispatches from the Poetry Wars was a great little, shit-stirring website that reminded us that poetry wars are ongoing and critical, if they lead to dialog. Community happens only when there is...
The Undercommons Remembers Michael McClure
The Undercommons is a literary salon that was founded a few months ago, happened in person once a month a few times and has moved to Zoom for the time-being. We've studied Denise Levertov and The...
Rattle Magazine Interview
I'm delighted to have a poem and an interview in the latest Rattle Magazine. This interview is not one I conducted but one that was done with ME! And it was the best one anyone has ever done with...
BIPF Virtual Poetry Fest/Zoomuse
One of the big joys of poetry is to go to festivals, maybe have a chance to read, but certainly have a chance to be in the company of other living poets and talking shop, craft and opportunities....
Zoom McClure Tribute
One of my poetry heroes died May 4. I met and interviewed Michael McClure in 1995 when he was visiting Seattle to promote the book Three Poems with the new long poem Dolphin Skull as the first of...
Zoomuse, Reading for Subud
SICA-International, the cultural wing of my spiritual community, Subud, has created a weekly cyber poetry series featuring Subud members from round the world who write poetry. I will be featured...
Strange Fruit: Poems on the Death Penalty
I'm delighted to have work in a new anthology entitled: Strange Fruit: Poems on the Death Penalty. It was edited by Sarah Zale and Terry Persun and seeing that our shelter-in-place restrictions...
R.I.P. Michael McClure, 20-Oct-1932 – 4-May-2020
I will never forget meeting Michael McClure, interviewing him in 1995 at the old KZOK-FM studios on Queen Anne Hill, him taking me out for Vietnamese food saying lunch was "on Penguin" (his...
PEN America Emergency Writers Fund
Artists have to train themselves to not link their own self-esteem to outside validation. In THIS culture, the job is much harder because of what the composer Charles Wuorinen said to the New York...
Sam Green’s ATBS Binding
Huge gratitude goes out to Washington's first Poet Laureate, Sam Green, who has bound my new book A Time Before Slaughter/Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia. He did it a week or so ago and sent...
Bradner Gardens Concert, Aug 17
I'm delighted to read poems again with the backing of the Jim O'Halloran Quartet, Saturday, August 17, 2024, 7pm at Bradner Gardens. The gardens are at 1730 Bradner Place South in the Mount Baker...
Social Acceleration and the Postcard Antidote
I was fortunate to be invited to teach spontaneous poetry methods at Holden Village, which is a spiritual retreat in the North Cascades. It is a former mining town and is a 45 minute drive from the...
Another DaySong (1980)
Another DaySong (1980) By Paul E Nelson Alongside The Day Song of Casa del Colibiri, Another Day Song (1980) is a fantastic meditation throughout the day via insight and poetry. Nelson's works...
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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