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
August Poetry Postcard Fest Instructions
OK poets! At this point we are one over the record 302 poets we set last year, but I am sure we'll get much past that. I have sent a list via email and am posting the instructions here as well for...
August Poetry Postcard Project, Year 8!
It is almost August once again and this means POSTCARDS! The August Poetry Postcard Project is an exercise in responding to other poets. You write a poem a day for the month of August, write it...
Community Acupuncture and the Collaborative Commons
I have been pretty inspired by a talk Jeremy Rifkin gave at Town Hall on April 7th, as it gives me hope that there is something more I can do to hasten the end of capitalism other than crawl into a...
Peter Culley’s Hammertown
The first moment I heard about Peter Culley's serial poem Hammertown, immediately I intuited that it was similar to what I was doing with A Time Before Slaughter. It would be a couple of years...
American Sentences May & June 2014
OK OK, here is my latest harvest of American Sentences. They are taken from the middle of March to today and though the time that my Father died in Chicago. Click here for the essay about the...
Red Sky Poetry Theater
It's odd how death makes us pause and reconsider our own lives. When my Father died, I got the hunch within a week or so to look at our bloodline and traced his maternal line to England in 1450. My...
Father’s Day/My Model of Illness (Consciousness)
Since my Dad died on May 11, there have been a lot of thoughts of him that have gone through my head, as you can imagine. With the help of Subud and the latihan kedjiwaan I have been able to do...
Hailey, ID, Pound House, Bowe Bergdahl
Mer and I recently returned from a mammoth road trip from Seattle to Minneapolis, Chicago, DC, Pittsburgh, Decatur, Indiana, Chicago, Minneapolis, Sutherland, Nebraska, Denver, Laramie and Hailey,...
Clyfford Still Museum
As part of our marathon road trip, Mer, Ella and I stopped in Denver specifically for the purpose of visiting the Clyfford Still Museum. One of the most unique painters in USAmerican history, Still...
Loose in Cascadia
I have left a couple of browser tabs open on my mac for a couple of weeks now because of their relevance to my ongoing cultural investigation of Cascadia. Both have to do with a study by two...
McClure’s 88th (A Zoom Reading/Tribute)
This is an update of the post that was used to promote the Zoom reading of the 1995 poem Dolphin Skull by Michael McClure. It was recorded 12N, Tuesday, October 20, 2020. My thanks to Amy Evans...
Ian Boyden Interview (A Forest of Names)
They are 108 poems that “illuminate a hidden landscape in the names of children killed in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake.” Many of their deaths could have been prevented if not for the shoddy...
A Fly Landed
I missed out on Rattle's Poets Respond AGAIN!
The interview I conducted with Sam O’Hana, a Ph.D. student at CUNY, is immensely critical and immensely validating for the work we do at the Cascadia Poetics Lab. At its core, the discussion is about whether writing is for people of means, or if it can be people who have skill and something to say. It means the literary gatekeepers have failed us and have a role in perpetuating neoliberalism in North America which has paved the way for authoritarianism. The interview is available as a podcast here and as a YouTube video here. Below, I have pasted in the transcript and here is my introduction to Sam O’Hana and his topic.