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.
After The Japanese 80-82
More "alternate takes" in this series which I have been serializing here and which is over 18 months old. More poems about Zappa, my late cat and my reaction. You can't see the "Z" anymore but you...
2015 Postcard Final Stats
The signup for the 9th August Poetry Postcard Fest is final and the list has been sent to all participants. The total number of participants is down from an all-time high in 2014 - 423, to 208 in...
505. The Lake’s Brain
I was taking my corridor walk June 23, 2015, and was stunned by the reflection of the sun on wavelets of Lake Washington. I tried to get a decent video capture of the phenomenon (after looking at a...
Comment from a Postcarder
I am running this comment (from this post) as a post on its own just to take time to appreciate the sentiment. It looks like the fest this year will have less than half the participants, but if the...
2015 Poetry Postcard F.A.Q.’s
A few random questions posed by participants, or would-be participants, in the 2015 August Poetry Postcard Fest. By the way, this is your last call for registration as that ends July 27 at 12:01...
Marilyn Stablein Interview
Marilyn Stablien is a Portland poet and book artist. She has lived in New York, New Mexico, the Himalayas, Seattle and is included in Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia. We sat down in her dining...
Why a Postcard Fee This Year?
I got an unsigned email this morning about the postcard fest: hello paul wondering - why is there a fee for participating now? what is done with over $4000 you would collect if over 400 sign up...
The Postcard Is…
The Owner of the Red Wheelbarrow
Being a William Carlos Williams fan, this story was a natural for me. A scholar by the name of William Logan, a professor at the University of Florida, (with help from a local historian) did the...
The Joy of Postcards
I'm back in that mode again, a time of year when poetry gets right to the front of my daily consciousness. Some who know me would argue that it is that way anyway, but during the annual August...
American Prophets: Interviews With Thinkers, Activists, Poets and Visionaries
by Paul E. Nelson (Author), Allen Ginsberg, Wanda Coleman A book of sixteen interviews taken from the best of over 600 conducted by Seattle poet Paul E Nelson. The book includes an A-List of...
56 Days of August
by Ina Roy-Faderman (Author), Paul E. Nelson (Editor), J.I. Kleinberg (Editor) Postcards are electric. I get excited just turning a rack of postcards around at the drugstore. There was a time before...
American Sentences
By Paul E Nelson This is a collection of American Sentences...A collection of 17-syllable sentences-the North American version of haiku, a form created by Allen Ginsberg-from a poet who has written...
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.



