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
Cascadia to Taos
OK, I'm back. It was 4,167 miles in Que (my Honda) to Portland, Boise (via John Day River watershed in Oregon), to Moab, Grand Junction, CO, Denver, Taos, Quemado, NM, Phelan, CA, Lancaster, CA,...
Make It True Readings (dan raphael interview)
The effort to get the word out about Make It True: Poetry from Cascadia begins in Portland, with a reading organized by longtime Portland poet dan raphael, who wrote: A reading to celebrate the...
ATJ 65-68
I love this notion of pre-bedtime suggestions. I have been doing that the last few months, or more based on the latest poems to be posted here from the ongoing series After The Japanese. I have...
50 Days til Postcards
I am starting to get emails about the August Poetry Postcard Fest. Questions like: 1) Is the fest on this year? (Yes). 2) Can you sign me up now? (No). 3) What are the main changes this year? (This...
Wildcrafting Seward Park
You think of the term "gardener" and something mild is evoked, perhaps an older person, but use the term "wildcrafter" and something subversive is suggested, perhaps with links to paganism. Yet...
Cascadia Dialog
The discussion I'd hoped for after the first and second Cascadia Poetry Festivals, is beginning to manifest in the wake of the 3rd iteration of the fest and the first in Canada. (Nanaimo, B.C. of...
Cascadia Poetry Festival 3 – Nanaimo
Sometimes there are events in my life that are so intense, or have so much action packed into a short time, it takes me a long time to write about them. Having founded a poetry festival for the...
After The Japanese 61-64
My sister Barb once gave me a T-shirt designed to help me remember my roots, my hometown and the pride in which those of us from the Second City have in our town. The message was the same as that...
Clyfford Still: Colville & Beyond
On Sunday, April 19, 2015, I interviewed Patricia Failing, Professor Emerita of the University of Washington about an exhibition she is curating in Denver at the Clyfford Still Museum. Clyfford...
Hillman City Haibun (Tobacco & Other Vegetables)
Maybe it's my Virgo nature that allows me to enjoy vicariously the lives of people whose work I admire but whose lifestyles have aspects I would not care to replicate. I would not say the phrase...
Jeanne Heuving on Nate Mackey Destination Out
Jeanne Heuving is the editor of a fascinating new book of scholarship on one of the most important poets of our time, Nate Mackey. The book is entitled Nathaniel Mackey, Destination Out: Essays on...
David Stephen Calonne: Diane di Prima Visionary Poetics & The Hidden Religions
Interview with David Stephen Calonne, author of Diane di Prima: Visionary Poetics and the Hidden Traditions, Recorded via Zoom, Sunday, June 6, 2021, 1:30pm Diane di Prima, who died in October 2020:...
Poetry Postcards Black Mountain Style
I was delighted to team up with postcard poet (with a new book!) Margaret Lee for an essay that has been published on the website of the Journal for Black Mountain College Studies. Postcard poets...
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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