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.
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...
473. More Listening Than Longing
Here is the 3rd postcard poem from this year's fest and my 473rd overall since the postcard fest started in 2007. I love the Levertov quote to begin this poem. How many times do we hear poems that...
472. Dos Rodillas Artificiales
My second poem from the 2014 August Poetry Postcard Fest was inspired by a dream and by my ongoing investigation into how my body responds to certain negative thought patterns. The card is a photo...
More on Trip to Puebla, Mexico
Am going though my recent journal entries to note the significant events during my recent trip to Puebla, Mexico. As I posted last week, I traveled to Mexico to attend the 14th Subud World Congress,...
471. Killing Gato
This is the first poem I wrote for the 2014 August Poetry Postcard Fest. It was inspired by a renewed plunge into Carla Bley's landmark album Escalator Over The Hill. (Audio. Pdf.) If you listen to...
Frida’s House (fotos)
I am back now for two full days from my first Subud World Congress, which was staged in Puebla, Mexico, August 1-17. People are cutting me off in traffic, I notice how irritated I get when people...
Reflexiones desde Puebla, Conversation Cafe
I've always known the quote as: "Travel is the worst enemy of ignorance" but in researching Mark Twain it appears to be: "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." Well, you get...
Rainier Beach Arts & Crafts Market
I am delighted to be part of the Rainier Beach Arts & Crafts Market, Saturday, December 5 from 11am to 3pm. Thanks to Ellen VanderWey, I'll be displaying books at 8735 Hamlet Ave S, a couple of...
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...
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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