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
Notes on A Sense of the Whole (Reading Mark Gonnerman Reading Gary Snyder)
Mark Gonnerman was a participant in SPLAB's Becoming Cascadian retreat last spring. In 1997 he organized a yearlong research workshop on Gary Snyder's long poem Mountains and Rivers Without End....
2018 Postcard Participation
293 people are registered for the 12th August POetry POstcard Fest in 2018. Included are participants from Alberta (1), Alabama (9), Arkansas (1), Arizona (1), British Columbia (1), California (26),...
Postcard Impersonality
Reading Mark Gonnerman's book A Sense of the Whole: Reading Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End I came to Tim Dean's essay on The Other Voice. In the essay he states that in his 40 year...
Postcards in the Park
Two editors of 56 Days of August and two contributors gathered yesterday at the annual Poets in the Park event in Redmond, Washington. Ina Roy-Faderman, Your Humble Narrator, Joanna Thomas and Matt...
Epistolary Poetry by Sam Hamill
I have been getting caught up on some of Sam Hamill's work since his death back in April. Last night reading from his 1981 book of "casual essays" or "over-the-shoulder" glances he titled At Home in...
Vince Balestri, Brian Kent, Eric Pollard (Sept 1997)
I finished cataloging the IPiPP/SPLAB archives today, Saturday, June 23, 2018, at 5:36pm, thanks to a 4Culture grant and I am digitizing as much as I can before the audio is transferred to its new...
Ed Sanders 2000 Interview
From the Archives: Interview 1 - 22:07 Interview 2 - 23:08 Show Opening - 4:10
Planet Drum on Cascadia
The premier organization dedicated to the concept of bioregionalism is the Planet Drum Foundation, founded by Peter Berg and Judy Goldhaft. Their latest newsletter is out with a special offer that...
Wanda Coleman 2002 Interview
Going through the SPLAB (IPiPP) audio archives thanks to 4Culture, I came across this interview I'd forgotten I had. Wanda Coleman from January 2002, first aired in February 2002. In it she talks...
George Bowering 2005 Interview
I first met George Bowering at the Victoria School of Writing Summer School in 2005. It was the tenth anniversary of that summer school and since then has ceased operations. I had taken a weeklong...
Bradner Gardens Reading, Margin Shift
It might be the 56 Days of August, but I'll take a break from writing postcards for a moment to read at two local cultural events that I've been part of before. Margin Shift: Friends in Poetry has...
John Olson on The Day Song of Casa del Colibrí
It was wonderful seeing John and Roberta Olson, Willie Smith, Denis Mair, Phoebe Bosche, Trudy Mercer, Bart Baxter, Elliott Bronstein and other writers from the Red Sky Poetry Theater days at events...
The Tunnel: A Literary and Arts Crawl
I'm delighted to be part of a literary arts event Sunday, July 9 from 5-8pm. The Tunnel: A Literary and Arts Crawl is the mastermind of Greg Bem, who will be moving from Seattle to Spokane for a job...
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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