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.
Billy Crystal Eulogy for Muhammad Ali
I think it was the second fight between Joe Frazier and Muhammad Ali where, at Dever School on the Northwest Side of Chicago, one of my black schoolmates, bussed in from a black neighborhood, asked...
6.9.16 – American Sentence (Chicory)
I remember a former neighbor, the son of Okies who grew up in rural California, when he saw my old Black Lab Kuma eating grass, he said: "We got a grazer!" Indeed, as am I. Whether it's hawthorne...
6.8.16 – American Sentences
Most recent American Sentence.
6.6.16 American Sentences
Yes, I am still writing daily American Sentences. (One a day since 1.1.01.) Jim O'Halloran and I had a gas Friday night (6.3.16) at Another Read Through in Portland on Mississippi and read June...
Elizabeth Woods Postcard Interview
Elizabeth Woods checks in from Down Under with a Postcard Fest interview. An excerpt: EW-The festival is now in its tenth year, what are some of the notable aspects a changes you have seen along the...
American Sentences in PDX
It will be my first reading in Portland in over ten years. Can't remember the exact time and place of the last reading and it happens Friday, June 3 @7pm at Another Read Through in Portland, Oregon....
2016 August Poetry Postcard Fest is Coming!
The call for the tenth year of the August Poetry Postcard Fest will be released on July 4, 2016, and tickets go on sale at that time. Like last year, as soon as 32 participating poets get signed up,...
ti-TCR 13: For Jamie Reid (1941-2015)
I am delighted to be represented in The Capilano Review's special web folio for Jamie Reid who died last year. Download here. Featuring Carol Reid, bill bissett, George Bowering, Eve Joseph, Daphne...
Throwback Thursday
Lost in the Woods edition: See the whole story here: https://paulenelson.com/about/lost-in-the-woods-sept-2000/five-who-survived-wilderness/
Poetics as Cosmology (Talk given to Cal State L.A., March 21, 2022)
We do what we know before we know what we do. Charles Olson,as quoted by Robert Creeley inpoets of the cities of new york and san francisco 1950-1965 (Dutton ’74). p. 62 This subject is near and...
Proprioception
Ever since Fred Wah mentioned proprioception in an interview we did that was posted on YouTube and made into a podcast, I have been plunged back into a study of this capacity. It's how human and...
Reading w/ Jim O’Halloran Trio
It was a remarkable experience reading my poems with the accompaniment of the Jim O'Halloran Trio on February 25, 2022 at Kezira Café. Jim's a wonderful musician, bandleader and arranger. He...
In Honor of David McCloskey “The Father of Cascadia”
David McCloskey passed away on July 3. In honor of his lifetime of work to create and spread a culture that was deeply connected to the Cascadian bioregion, Cascadian Prophets, which owes more than just its name to his work, we want to share this interview from October, 2013. Find it transcribed on our website.
To listen to the original audio of this interview, click here.
Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website.
In Honor of David McCloskey "The Father of Cascadia"
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.
Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website.
To get original poetry right in your mailbox this summer, check out the Poetry Postcard Fest.