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
Hillman City Haibun 2 (Pink Floyd)
Pink Floyd, Soldier Field, June 19, 1977, Chicago, IL. One estimate suggests the crowd was 95,000 people. This is likely the largest concert attendance at a show I've ever attended, although there...
After The Japanese 17-20
This latest installment of After The Japanese, poems written after the classic Japanese poetry anthology, is below. These poems were written in Winter/Spring 2014 and I am beginning to think lichen...
Call for Beat Papers
The next EBSN (European Beat Studies Network) Conference is in Brussels in October. I attended a conference at the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 2011 and Franca Bellarsi is a warm and capable...
Hillman City Haibun_1-(Dead_Cat_Magnet)
2014 was not an easy year over on Lucile Street. My cat Zappa died March 30. Meredith's beloved Tupelo died on October 17 and Mer was entrusted to care for a neighbor's elderly cat over the...
Police Presuppositions (Poetry in Columbia City)
Georgia McDade has invited me and a few other local poets to read on the subject of police abusing their authority this Sunday. The invite is below. As a person whose brother is a peace officer I...
FZ (From the Utility Muffin Research Kitchen)
Music has always been a huge part of my life. From a kid who heard my Dad playing records on the hi-fi (Xavier Cugat, Stan Kenton &c) to listening to the Top 40 radio station in Chicago, (WLS)...
The Future of Storytelling, Puebla, Mexico
This past August I had the good fortune to attend the 14th Subud World Congress in Puebla, Mexico, or the Congreso Mundial, as the locals called it. There are numerous stories I could tell about my...
After The Japanese 13-16
This latest installment of After The Japanese, poems written after the classic Japanese poetry anthology, is below. Inspirations coming, as usual, from a wide variety of sources such as the...
Last of the 2014 American Sentences
Tomorrow marks 14 years of a daily writing practice of American Sentences. I started January 1, 2001, and when I get mine done tomorrow I will have written AT LEAST 5,110. You can read more about...
Top Ten Posts of 2014
I did this last year, a post of the top ten posts/pages of the year. I excluded American Sentences and all individual pages associated with that daily practice and also Organic Poetry and individual...
Holly J. Hughes Interview
Holly Hughes is the author of Hold Fast, Sailing by Ravens, coauthor of The Pen and The Bell: Mindful Writing in a Busy World, and editor of the award-winning anthology, Beyond Forgetting: Poetry...
Mammal Grafting
I am going to post this today though I am going to release it as a "page" or doc in Week Two of my current workshops series A Sequence of Energies. There is still room in this workshop, Sunday...
Zoomuse Reading (The Recording)
My huge appreciation goes out to Andrew Hall, SICA-International, my Subud Sisters and Brothers and a few fans who came to my March 5, 2021 Zoomuse reading. I have found that I feel more at ease...
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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