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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.

512. Whale Poker

This poem reminds me of the on and off dialog I have been having with a Canadian poet who is down on post-modernism because much of it is: “gibberish” in his view, but whose own work is clichéd and...

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American Sentences is Published!

On the 60th anniversary of the Beat Generation coming out party, the Six Gallery reading, my 14+ year project American Sentences made it into the world as a published book. That copies were shipped...

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Eileen Myles in Seattle

She's apparently in the literary "mainstream" now, according to The Guardian in a typo-laden, but important piece dated Oct 1, 2015, but Eileen Myles has been a real writer, with tremendous depth...

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Practicing Breath and Outside

Watching the posts and the likes and the ads float by on Facebook is fascinating to me and I check in a few times a day. I can do a Google search for something like DIVORCE or CALIFORNIA TRAFFIC...

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Nate Mackey at UW Bothell

I went to hear Nate Mackey this evening (Wednesday, Sept 30) at the UW and I strongly encourage Puget Sound area literature fans to attend his reading and conversation Thursday, Oct 1 as part of the...

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511. Postcard Fragrance

This 2015 August Poetry Postcard Fest poem continues the “being as comedian” thread from the last poem, makes a reference to a direction in a prompt I saw online and alludes to some of the more out...

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EBSN Brussels

The 4th European Beat Studies Network is happening in Brussels 28-31 Oct and as reported before, I will be attending and presenting. My talk is: Buddhism, Hua-yen, Latihan and American Sentences...

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510. Divine Comedian

This poem was inspired by something said in a talk given by Muhammad Subuh Sumohadiwidjojo, the man who founded the worldwide Subud spiritual community. I have been a member since 2004. The notion...

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509. Dream Anagrams

This postcard poem went overseas, so good to give it two months before posting here. I think in future years I may send to the folks overseas first so that there is time for them to receive the...

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Bowering/Stanley on Cascadia

I was pleasantly surprised to be tagged on Facebook in a post that promoted a podcast by New Star Books of Vancouver. The podcast featured two elders of the Cascadia poetry community, Vancouver...

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American Sentences Talk

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,...

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100 Thousand Poets for Change

100 Thousand Poets for Change

I'm delighted to be part of an event which has been happening for many years, organized and conceived of by Michael Rothenberg. 100 Thousand Poets for Change is the event, one for which I helped...

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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