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
Lewis MacAdams Dead
This was in the L.A. Times tonight: Lewis MacAdams, a poet and crusader for restoring the concrete Los Angeles River to a more natural state and co-founder of one of the most influential...
Documenting Pandemic
Thanks to POPO participant Linda Clifton, I learned about an essay by George Saunders in The New Yorker: A key paragraph for me: Are you keeping records of the e-mails and texts you’re getting, the...
A Time Before Slaughter/Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia
When the box of books arrives at your house and for the first time you hold your new book in your hand, it is quite an experience. I remember moving to Seattle in 2009 and having the first box of my...
POPO is Here (Early)
Faced with the prospect of not having any (in person) poetry readings for a while due to the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) and self-isolation for several weeks, the SPLAB Board agreed with my notion...
(Streaming) Lyric World Conversations with Koon Woon
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED DUE TO THE CURRENT COVID-19 PANDEMIC I was delighted to be part of an event that features a local poet who has been part of the Seattle literary scene for many years and...
Plugging Into the Current: The Immediacies of Daphne Marlatt’s Writing
I had a flurry of activity about a month ago. I prepared a talk for a poet's society with which I was engaged for a couple of months to serve as a sort of "dress rehearsal" for a talk at a...
A Time Before Slaughter/Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia
The tenth anniversary edition of A Time Before Slaughter is coming out on April 11 with a launch at Open Books. My publisher, Apprentice House, is adding a whole separate book to the new edition,...
Interview with Shin Yu Pai (Ensō)
Shin Yu Pai's new book, Ensō is categorized as a künstlerroman, an artist's novel, a class of bildungsroman or apprentice novel, that deals with the maturation of a young artist. Yet this is not...
Cascadian Zen Interview with Jason Wirth
“Cascadian Zen” is an event at Seattle University on February 14 and 15, 2020 that’s organized loosely around exploring the relationship between the Cascadian bioregion as it intersects with Zen...
Cascadian Zen
I am delighted to be part of the Cascadian Zen weekend at Seattle U, which I am helping to organize with Shin Yu Pai and Jason Wirth. Shin Yu is the former Poet Laureate of Redmond and Jason is...
Postcards from Here, Postcards from Mapes Creek
I had no idea when Bhakti Watts and I moved to Rainier Beach in 2017 how much we would love this neighborhood, how much it would give back to us and shape our lives. And yes, we've each survived...
A Journal of the Plague Years
I like to think of it as projective journalism. Maybe it's becoming a lost art to write and publish history with deep perception hours after events happen, but Susan Zakin and her crew at Journal of...
DaySong Miracle (Past 62) Profiled on SICA-USA
I was delighted to see the SICA-USA blog post written about my new book DaySong Miracle (Past 62). I knew it was coming, but to read the way my Subud brother Jim O'Halloran handled the information...
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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