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.
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...
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...
For Chick Corea
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/chick-corea-obit-1127283/ “Nobody was more open, more finely tuned to the moment…” quote from John Mayer, Rolling Stone obituary.
In Honor of David McCloskey “The Father of Cascadia”
David McCloskey passed away on July 3. In honor of his lifetime of work to create and spread a culture that was deeply connected to the Cascadian bioregion, Cascadian Prophets, which owes more than just its name to his work, we want to share this interview from October, 2013. Find it transcribed on our website.
To listen to the original audio of this interview, click here.
Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website.
In Honor of David McCloskey "The Father of Cascadia"
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.
Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website.
To get original poetry right in your mailbox this summer, check out the Poetry Postcard Fest.