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PAUL E NELSON

Cascadia Poetry Festival 8 Paul E Nelson at the microphone

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.

Columbia City Gallery Series

The artist's cooperative gallery in Seattle's vibrant Columbia City neighborhood (where I live) has added a really engaging Literary Arts series and I'll be reading on Sunday, December 13. (See the...

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517. Blue Demons

Another one of my 2014 photographs turned into postcard, this one begins the summer-long fascination with chicory. Once identified (thank you Carol Blackbird Edson), I began to eat as many of the...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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,...

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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...

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FLEXIBLE MIND THIS CLOUD IS A LIFE

FLEXIBLE MIND THIS CLOUD IS A LIFE

I have been fortunate to facilitate online workshops since Fall 2020. It is one of the great personal developments of the pandemic restructuring that we're experiencing right now and, of course, if...

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Deborah Poe

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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Deborah Poe on "flagging the apocalypse pageantry"

by Paul E Nelson