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
After The Japanese 9-12
When one writes poetry from the practice of outside, you can go back and look at poems 10 months old and marvel at the consciousness there because in a way, it's not you. As drummer Hamid Drake told...
R.I.P. Ralph Maud (1928-2014)
On December 11, 2014, Cascadia lost one of its most important scholars when Ralph Maud died a couple of weeks short of his 86th birthday. He was three days older than my Dad who also died this year,...
Cuba Libre
I had just dropped off my daughter Ella Roque at her Spanish immersion pre-school and parked in front of my favorite juice bar when the top of the hour radio headlines broadcast that President Obama...
After the Japanese 5-8
My hiking partner and I had made it to the end of the Hoh River Trail, 17.5 miles, and had done a silence ritual, where each of us spent the day away from the other in the Olympic National Park. I'd...
Sam Hamill & Christopher Yohmei Blasdel N.1.14
On November 1, 2014, the home of my spiritual community was the site of an event that truly illustrates the mission of the cultural wing of said organization, working at the confluence of creativity...
Bioregionalism or Endless Garbage
There needs to be a new idea or a more fleshed out idea of what a human being is in reference to sharing the biosphere with other life. - Peter Berg This is part of what essentially is Peter Berg's...
Uncascadian
It was a long day, but one filled with vision and inspiration last Saturday (Dec 6, 2014) as I was part of a Board Retreat for CascadiaNow! I agreed to be Board President when asked by founder...
100 Poems After the Japanese
Having finished back in May a series of poems inspired by the classic Japanese anthology, I come to it now after letting the poems sit for a while, and re-read them in the spirit of seeing how my...
St. Paul Seattle N.30.14
It is a testament to the good of social media that an event like Seattle/St. Paul, which happened last night in St. Paul, Minnesota, with a poet I'd never met before, Mark Fleury, could happen. My...
The Biosphere & the Bioregion
I've just finished the new book on the Essential Writings of Peter Berg. The Biosphere and the Bioregion is the title and it is so prophetic and visionary, I am compelled to cull through all my...
McClure Tribute
I am delighted to be part of a Michael McClure Memorial Tribute being produced by City Lights Books on the occasion of Michael's last book of poems Mule Kick Blues. Details: On the one-year...
Zoomuse Reading, Friday, March 5, 2021
Check out this interview about my work, conducted by Andrew Hall, as a poet from the perspective of my spiritual community, Subud: From Andrew Hall: At the March 5 Zoomuse event, Paul will be...
A Sequence of Energies
The organizing topic for the next workshop I will facilitate comes from a notion of Robin Blaser's about serial form being a: "Sequence of Energies." In this workshop we take the methods and the...
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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