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
Post-Fest Thoughts
There are about a thousand things I could write about the recently concluded Cascadia Poetry Festival. That John Olson could step in with only a few hours notice to read on the Main Stage was a...
Poet Interviews
I am both excited and anxious about the 4th Cascadia Poetry Festival starting this Thursday (Nov 3, 2016) and concluding Sunday at 6pm. Working with a local organizing team, we've tried to put...
2 Anthologies: Footsteps & South Seattle Emerald
I am blessed to have work in TWO anthologies coming out in the next two weeks. The first is the South Seattle Emerald's Emerald Reflections: A South Seattle Emerald Anthology. It comes out of the...
Happy 69th Nate Mackey
Nate Mackey, born on this day in 1947, gets the Birthday Anagram Treatment. And do enjoy the interview we did in 2012. And this excerpt from an interview we did that was published in Amerarcana as...
Three Friends Carousel
I can't begin to say how delighted I am that this interview with José Kozer I conducted in 2015 is now available as a book. I so wanted to post as much of this material as possible because it may be...
Jeanne Heuving The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics
On Friday, October 14, 2016, I had the good fortune to interview Jeanne Heuving about her new book: The Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics. That she was writing about Projective Verse was...
Cascadia Poetry Festival
Friend, just 3 weeks until the 4th Cascadia Poetry Festival. I hope you will consider attending. We need your support of this event, which is the most ambitious thing I have ever attempted to do. My...
RIP Bridget A. Nutting
Sad to report that one of the longtime August Poetry Postcard Fest participants, Bridget Nutting of Vancouver, Washington, died yesterday, Sunday, October 9, 2016. From her son Josh: On Sunday...
Blue River Writers Gathering 2016
So much to share with the preparations for the 4th Cascadia Poetry Festival Nov 3-6, with the last day of our fundraising campaign to install a modest plaque to honor the memory of Denise Levertov...
Cascadia IV (I Did Not Build That)
I'm thinking of the controversy from an event during the 2012 U.S. Presidential campaign. It's the You Didn't Build That notion and was the response by less conscious people about the nature of how...
Poetics as Cosmology Workshops Fall 2022
Poetics as Cosmology (Intro to Spontaneous Composition) A five week online (Zoom) workshop for people who have had a little experience in spontaneous poetry composition and want more. Join Cascadia...
Margin Shift June 16, 2022!
(This post has been updated to include Tay Stafford, who has just been added to the bill. There WILL be streaming on Facebook for those who can't make it down to Belltown.) I am delighted to read at...
Haiku NW Talk about Poetry Postcard Fest
It has been eleven years since I was a presenter at Haiku North America, on the campus of Fort Worden in 2011. I spoke on the subject of American Sentences, those 17 syllable poems that I have been...
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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