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
First Quarter 2015 American Sentences
I started to harvest my American Sentences after filling up my latest pocket journal and by the time I finished that harvest, I was halfway done with another pocket journal. So goes the writing time...
After The Japanese 49-52
The last three of the poems in this series written in Marblemount, WA, seem so distant given the contrast between last year's winter snow and this year's winter-of-no-winter. Also a year ago the AWP...
Seattle (City of No Lit Crit)
If you are involved at all in the Seattle writing community, you have no doubt heard by now about the op-ed former Hugo House Writer-in-Residence and novelist Ryan Boudinot wrote for the local...
Winter of No Winter & Seattle’s Water (Hillman City Haibun 10)
It's over now, but Winter 2014/2015 in Seattle was not much of a winter. Many people around here were planting their gardens over a month ago and I suspect that was very wise. Many plants have been...
Audio from King’s Books 3.13.15
I am grateful to Connie Walle for inviting me to be a featured reader at the Distinguished Writer's Series in Tacoma. I did it last Friday, March 13, 2015 and was delighted to see many long-time...
After The Japanese 45-48
The latest in this series of poems written in 2014 and archived here cover ground from Lorine Niedecker, to Michael McClure, to Amalio Madueño (Garcia), to Vincent Van Gogh and were also written in...
Margin Shift Reading Series
It has been described by one Seattle writer as a reading series that leans toward: "the academic, conceptual and slightly Canadian." It is Margin Shift, a new poetry reading series run by a...
Hillman City Haibun 9 Anagrams
It was probably in 1995 or '96 that Danika Dinsmore made me aware of a form of poetry called Present Beau, a kind of poem that employs the restraint of using only the letters in someone's name in...
After the Japanese 41-44
This series of poems, posted four at a time and archived here, continues with some written on a short retreat in Marblemount, WA, near North Cascades National Park. They are all written in response...
Robin Blaser’s Last Interview
I was searching for my interview with Robin Blaser online and it appears the link that was the best, from Lou Rowan's Golden Handcuffs Review, is down and I'm going to rectify that here. Actually...
Pocket Lint (A New Journal)
I have admired Warren Dean Fulton for years, maybe since I saw some of his cute little chapbooks like the U.S. Sonnets of George Bowering: That was published by Pooka Press in 2007. Warren's been on...
Responding to the Black Mystery School Pianists
I saw this article linked in an article I was reading and then a friend sent it to me, so there was something synchronistic about it right off the bat. “God’s way of remaining anonymous” some wise...
McClure’s Last Book Mule Kick Blues
Michael McClure died one year ago, May 4, 2020 and the last book he wrote will be launched by legendary publisher City Lights May 8, 2021, via Zoom, 3pm. A memorial tribute to Michael with readings...
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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