Paul E Nelson presenting at Cascadia Poetry Festival 8, photo by Leszek Chudzinski
Paul Nelson’s ongoing honing of the Day Song poetry event has produced some of the most lively and consequential verse of our time. How else write about the calamities and demands and mental/emotional/political consequences of the materialist apocalypse upon us, than an ongoing poesis of awareness and participation the anti-form the Day Song provides? Truly a praxis of proprioception and of Olson’s demand to “keep it moving…
– Sharon Thesen, Cascadian Poet/Scholar from B.C.
World Poetry Day (Seriality)
At the 11am presentation as part of my World Poetry Day/Free Coffee celebration at Caffé Umbria (Tutta Bella), I talked about seriality. In my interview with Nate Mackey 5 or so years ago, he said...
#IdesofTrump Report
On March 15, 2017, people gathered around the United States to write postcards to the 45th President of the United States, El Caudillo Analfabetico, SCROTUS and let him know what they thought of his...
World Poetry
Any self-respecting World Poetry Day would not be complete without poetry from around the world, so in the second hour, I read from Poems for the Millennium: Russia's Anna Akhmatova (from "Poem...
Cinquains
SO, World Poetry Day is under way and my 8am lecture is in the bag. We had an inspired participant who took on the task of writing a Cinquain, a five line poem with a syllable structure of...
Paul Interviewed by Ethelbert Miller
I was delighted to be interviewed today by legendary poet, literary organizer and radio host E. Ethelbert Miller for his On The Margin show on Washington, DC's WPFW. You can hear the interview here...
Free Cup of Coffee
Did you know March 21 is World Poetry Day? Yeah, UNESCO, the cultural arm of the United Nations decided that in 1999. Julius Meinl, a European coffee-roasting company upped the ante a few years ago...
RIP Darius Brusaferro
I was fortunate enough to meet Darius Brusaferro, a long-time Subud member, at one of the first Subud Menucha gatherings I attended, perhaps 2009 or 2010. I learned today on Facebook that he died in...
Resist Much/Obey Little
I am thinking of it as the most important anthology of political poetry since Sam Hamill's "Poets Against The War." "Resist Much Obey Little: Inaugural Poems to the Resistance" is a 738 page virtual...
Once in Blockadia: Stephen Collis Interview
On my way north to the Comox Valley to assist organizers of the Cascadia Poetry Festival to be held in Cumberland, September 8-10, 2017, I stopped in Delta, BC, to interview Stephen Collis about his...
A Few Postcard Notes
I'm just about finished with the 2017 Peace Postcards project. There are 28 poets on my list and without sending a card to myself, that means I had 27 poems to write and will probably get the last...
January Workshop Registration Open
A five week workshop which now has most of the same participants going into year three is over. I received a wonderful testimonial from Ann Graham Walker: I think you can take a lot of credit for...
Nina Menkes Producer of Brainwashed: Sex Camera Power
Thanks to a member of my Subud spiritual community, I was alerted to a new documentary about gender relations in Hollywood and a thesis by a director that says the "visual rhetoric" of camera angles...
Poetics as Cosmology Workshops in Des Moines
I am grateful to 4Culture and the Des Moines Arts Commission for the support of three free workshops next month. Poetics as Cosmology is the title of a workshop I have been facilitating online for...
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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