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
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...
American Sentences for Pop
I read Nine Sonnets for Pop and a few of these 17 syllable poems at my Dad's grave today as his remains were interred at the family burial plot in Elmhurst, Illinois. My siblings shared some stories...
Pop at Aunt Barbara’s Coffin
My Aunt Barbara Rose O'Connell died on Super Bowl Sunday, 2007, and there were ceremonies in Glendora, California, where she lived most of her life and outside of Chicago, where she was born and...
George Stanley on Innovation
One of the most powerful events of the recent Cascadia Poetry Festival (Cascadia II) was the panel: Cascadian Poetics: Innovations from Here. (Video of the panel here.) Nadine Maestas facilitated...
Paul E. Nelson Sr. Dead at 85
Born in Council Bluffs, Iowa, on December 27, 1928, Paul Everett Nelson Senior died today in his sleep in his home on the Northwest Side of Chicago at the age of 85. He is survived by his wife,...
Cascadia Poets Get a Taste of the Latihan
I've been asked by the Subud community to write about the 2nd Cascadia Poetry Festival, which happened May 1-4, 2014 at two locations: Seattle University and Spring Street Center. Spring Street...
Happy 71st Sam Hamill
I wrote a more extensive birthday post for Sam Hamill's 70th last year (see this) and this year I took a page (or three) out of the Book of Rexroth for Sam. You can see more of my engagements with...
USAmerica (After Allen Ginsberg)
This poem was read at the 2nd Cascadia Poetry Festival, at the After Party, May 3, 2014, at Spring Street Center and based on the Allen Ginsberg poem America, with a George Bowering twist.
Cascadia 2 Starts Today
So the Cascadia Poetry Fest articles and blog posts are now popping, see Paul Constant in the Stranger with an article on bioregional poetry with this quote: It's important that poetry is embracing...
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 Art of the Blurb
I have been asked on occasion to write blurbs for friends and acquaintances and, like any other form of writing, it takes some practice. The first thing is to learn what NOT to blurb. Really, if it...
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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