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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Sam Hamill on Why Poetry Matters
I re-posted this interview on this website and it's gotten about 200 hits and will be translated into Spanish by Hamill's translator, Esteban Moore. An excerpt: The editor of Copper Canyon Press for...
Organic Poetry Essays
I've been migrating my Org Po essays from OrganicPoetry.org to this site. This was the introductory page to the essays on that site. Comments are welcome. A book is coming out in 2012 from...
How George Bowering Writes Books
I never get tired of George Bowering. Some people say writing about writing is boring. They're usually right, but Bowering's writing on writing is fascinating. Take this bit excerpted from his new...
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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