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
Make It True meets Medusario
From the introduction (by Matt Trease) of an upcoming anthology I have had a hand in bringing into the world: Some Background This anthology is the result of a collaboration between Cuban Neobarroco...
Paul E Nelson’s Interviews by Jason Wirth
It was a very humbling experience for me Friday, December 14, 2018, to hear very intelligent and considerate people talk about different aspects of SPLAB's 25 years in existence, with a special...
Open Books Interviewing Workshop
I am delighted to be celebrating the release of American Prophets by way of doing interview workshops in and around Cascadia for the next few months. A workshop happens at Open Books: A Poem...
#SPLAB@25
The non-profit organization I founded on December 14, 1993 turns 25 tomorrow and we are going to celebrate. SPLAB started as It Plays in Peoria Productions and had a mission of creating radio...
One Mind (Impersonal)
The launch of AmericanProphets, my book of transcribed interviews mostly taken from the years of the syndicated radio show I hosted and produced between 1993 and 2004, has been not only a cathartic...
Unconventional Nelson
10.20.2018 - I told the UPS clerk my Mom’s first name was unconventional. #AmericanSentences When Bhakti and I were in Chicago last September, my Ma, Lesbia Nelson, was having lower back pain and so...
Feast on TISH & Cascadia
There is a great review of two door-stopping books of poetry in the new BC Booklook. The subjects are Daphne Marlatt and Fred Wah, two members of the legendary TISH group in Vancouver, BC, in the...
American Prophets Pre-Sales
SPLAB turns 25 on December 14, 2018, and we'll be celebrating in the town where SPLAB was founded, Auburn, Washington, the former Slaughter. I am asking readers of this blog and supporters of...
Tim McNulty Interview (Olympic National Park Natural History)
Interview with Tim McNulty on Olympic National Park: A Natural History 4th Edition. Recorded Sunday, October 28, 2018, at the home of Tim & Mary McNulty, Lost Mountain, WA There is something...
Elizabeth Cooperman, Thomas Walton, The Last Mosaic (Interview)
Interview with Elizabeth Cooperman and Thomas Walton on their book The Last Mosaic, published by Sagging Shorts, a division of Sagging Meniscus. Recorded Sunday, October 7, 2018, at the home of...
Online Winter Workshops
The Zoom workshops we started in 2020, when we were already sick of the pandemic and not yet sick of Zoom, continue in their fourth year and frankly, I do not have the Zoom fatigue the mainstream...
Barry McKinnon 1944-2023
I am terribly saddened to report the death of Prince George poet Barry McKinnon. Barry and I, with Nadine Maestas and George Stanley edited the first anthology of Cascadia poetry Make it True:...
The Poetics of De-Colonial Cascadia
I presented this at the 7th Cascadia Poetry Festival, on 7—OCT—2023, at the Subud House/ Spring Street Center."I'm located therefore I am." — Kombu-merri elder, Mary Graham.Ah to be...
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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