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
Bioregional Cultural Investigation
We do what we know before we know what we do. - Charles Olson. Little did I know in 2012 that the first Cascadia Poetry Festival would be the start of a 20 year bioregional cultural investigation...
Seattle Not So Great
Great article by Danny Westneat (former Valley Daily News columnist) about whether Seattle is great. In the article, he refers to an Atlantic magazine article entitled: Eleven Signs a City Will...
Beached America (Bob Koehler)
Bob Koehler is a Chicago-based Peace Journalist who has written an op-ed for Buzzflash at Truthout entitled: "When a Nation Has Lost Its Soul, Its Politics Become a Tacky TV Performance." Koehler's...
526. Fennelity
Unlike Chicory, I’ve been eating fennel the last couple of summers. The intensity of this herb is astounding and a wonderful taste that one gets in Cascadia summer. I heard it grows wild north of...
AG/BS Wait Till I’m Dead
An East Coast Jewish Democratic Socialist is running for President of the U.S. and it would make sense that there is a connection with Allen Ginsberg, who died in 1997 and who I interviewed in 1994....
1992 Peter Berg Interview
I was a rookie interviewer in 1992, when I had the good fortune to be able to interview Peter Berg of the Planet Drum Foundation about the concept of bioregionalism. When I listen back to the audio,...
525. Momentary Cultivation
An August Poetry Postcard from 2015 featuring yet another photo of mine from 2014, this one from the Skokomish Rez, I love the allusion to the American Indian Movement and hope President Obama will...
HRC and the Death of the Onion
I've loved the Onion for years and can remember almost wetting myself at the biting humor of some of the stories. (One on Ozzie Guillen comes to mind.) Dark, un-PC and probably the best thing going...
Hummingbird Resuscitation
I like to think of it as a good sign in my life when critters are waiting until I pass by to drop from the sky in need of a little aid. Fortunately this recent experience was only a hummingbird, but...
Left. Egalitarian. Sandernista.
In an essay I wrote ten years ago (!) I compared subcultures in North America to make a point about poetry cultures. The essay is Changing a Culture: (A Look at Cultural Modernism and Free Market...
Haibun de la Serna World Tour
Now that Haibun de la Serna, my latest book of poems, is out, it is time to launch the HdlS WORLD TOUR to promote it. I am blessed to have a sympathetic publisher in Koon Woon of Goldfish Press and...
Haibun de la Serna Published
I am delighted to announce today that a book I finished ten years ago has just been published by Koon Woon's Goldfish Press. Haibun de la Serna is the book. It consists of 99 neo-barroco haibun all...
Haibun de la Serna: 99 Haibun
by Paul E Nelson June 2022 Review by Pablo Baler Paul Nelson’s Haibun moves with the spirit of Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s greguerías, one of the unclassifiable micro-genres Gómez invented in his...
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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