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
480. More Dead Air
Inspiration for this poem came, in part, from a dream.
479. Girl w/ the Green Hair
Subud LGBTQ Youth Movement
One of the most memorable events at the recent 14th Subud World Congress in Puebla, Mexico, was a meeting centered around the acceptance (or lack of it) in the Subud community. Keep in mind our next...
478. Hipster Cancer
477. Still Echoing (For Lennie Tristano)
I've blogged about the inspiration for this poem before but here is the text and postcard image and below find the Soundcloud widget.
Fighting Coal Trains with Totem Poles (Jewell James)
Today I had the honor of interviewing Jewell James of the Lummi Tribe about his effort to create awareness and organize opposition to the export of coal from Wyoming and Montana to developing...
Ontological Kinesiology in Puebla
It was quite a melange of cultures in Puebla during the 14th Subud World Congress August 1-17, 2014. (See my previous posts here and here.) To give you some sense of how diverse the event was, these...
476. Logic of Ordnance
This poem continues from the last postcard poem and Levertov's notion of the acts that serve as counterstrokes to the ills of the world. She would have been writing about WWII, a war in which she...
475. Counterstroke
As with all 2014 August Poetry Postcard Fest poems, this one uses Levertov again as the source of its epigraph and the poem continues the theme of that quote and it weaves through familiar...
474. Ghost Training
The fourth poem from the 2014 August Poetry Postcard Fest, this one continues in the theme of the notion of The Practice of Outside. That an ancestor of Levertov was said to be able to understand...
Notes on Being Human Is an Occult Practice
I was excited to see a chapbook with such a provocative title. Magdalena Zurawski is the author and is currently Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia,...
Sharon Doubiago on Diane di Prima
Diane di Prima, August 6, 1929-October 25, 2020 I first learned of Diane di Prima as an actress. She played the part of Lula in the play The Dutchman by Leroi Jones (Amiri Baraka). It remains the...
Testimonials
Such sweet testimonials are coming in from participants in the recent Poetics as Cosmology course I facilitated, Oct-Nov 2020: Paul E. Nelson's "Poetics As Cosmology" course begins in a completely...
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.