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
George Bowering @ 80
The first Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada turns 80 today. I first met George Bowering at the (sadly now defunct) Victoria School of Writing Summer School in 2005. I had started my graduate...
516. Breakfast Special
More Salish art (one of my favorite card images) and a little piece of Wanda Coleman’s fire, in which you don’t eliminate clichés, per se, but “twist” them. Also, a nod to two different Benny...
Barthes on Trump
Give Judd Legum credit for using French Philosopher Roland Barthes (dead since 1980) to better understand the ascendancy of Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump. An article in...
Very Serious & Full of Vegetables
I FINALLY finished Crowded by Beauty, the wonderful biography of Philip Whalen. David Schneider brings a Zen perspective to chronicle the life of a poet who, along with Gary Snyder and Lew Welch,...
Gemini GEL, Rouen Cathedral, Seriality
In D.C. to visit my oldest daughter, or "My Kid the Journalist" as I tend to refer to her when I am sharing her articles on Facebook, I was delighted to find...
27. Hanging Leaves
Am working on a new series of poems, a couple of which I've read out at local open mics. Not ready yet to talk about them lest their shape be bent by what someone might say, but am up tonight in...
515. Other Demons
In this latest 2015 August Poetry Postcard poem, again a great Kyger quote which makes me think of field poetics, a subject her friend Robert Duncan had a thing or two to say about. Also a reference...
EBSN4 Report – Brussels
I'm back from an epic trip to Brussels, Belgium, where I attended the 4th European Beat Studies Network Conference. I had a chance to interview Polina McKay, one of the co-founders of the Network....
American Sentences at Andaluz! Nov 8
Hey, I am re-posting this with a sincere request to you to consider attending this event and hang out after somewhere in Columbia City. This book has been 14 years in the making & the form,...
Giverny & Rouen Cathedral
I am honored to have been included in the 4th European Beat Studies Network conference, which is happening now in Brussels, Belgium. I was last in Brussels in 2010 for the Tools of the Sacred...
Seriality (A 2022 Workshop:
In this workshop we take the methods and the organismic stance toward poetics (& life) and continue to investigate how to deepen one’s own work and life through spontaneous writing, rituals,...
Notes for American Sentences Talk to Haiku Koma Kulshan
Thanks to C.J. Prince and John Green of Haiku Koma Kulshan, I was invited to give a talk about American Sentences on Saturday, October 9, 2021 via Zoom to their Haiku group. I was given some topics...
American Sentences Talk
The second edition of my book of 17 syllable poems, American Sentences, was published in time for my 60th birthday party on September 22, 2021. Saturday, I'll have a chance to talk about the form,...
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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