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.
Four Hoarse Men Ride Again
A couple of years ago I became part of a group of poets that sought to explore poetry from the angle of pure sound in the tradition of Dada, Kurt Schwitters, the Four Horsemen (of Canada, from whom...
Hillman City Haibun 3 (Seattle Smells)
Just back from Miami where I had the good fortune to have access to the great Cuban poet José Kozer and do an interview, which I am working on getting posted here in a modified version as we await...
After the Japanese 21-24
It's a very special time in Cascadia, mid-winter (almost typed "mind) with the signs of spring beginning to push up out of the dirt or waft by invisibly like the scent of Sweetbox. (Sarcococca.) And...
Slaughter Birds
I am a big city guy. Keep in mind there are almost as many people in my home town (metro area) of Chicago 9.52M as there are in the STATES of Washington and Oregon. So one gets used to culture,...
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)...
Earth Day @ NorthWind
Has a nice ring to it, eh? Rob Lewis is one of three poets reading 7pm PDT Thursday, April 22, 2021 as part of the regular Northwind Reading Series. From the Northwind folk: To celebrate Earth Day...
Read/Study Mackey’s Double Trio
If not the culmination of a 40+ year serial poetry effort by perhaps the world's leading living practitioner of that stance toward poem making, it is a huge new hunk. Matt Trease and I look forward...
Last Year’s Pandemic Postcard (Not Yet)
My practice each morning includes reading the journal entry from the same day of the previous year. For instance, today I read Monday, April 6, 2020. It was Day 24 of the Shelter-in-Place...
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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