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.
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...
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,...
A Poet’s Obituary of Diane di Prima
Thank you Journal of the Plague Year for publishing this: My November 1999 interview with Diane di Prima: https://paulenelson.com/interviews/diane-di-prima-intervie/ Other Interviews:
Priscilla Long Interview
Priscilla Long is a Seattle-based poet, writer, editor and longtime independent teacher of writing. Her new book Holy Magic won the 2020 Sally Albiso Poetry Book Award and was published by MoonPath...
Diane di Prima R.I.P.
I met Diane di Prima when we brought her to the old SPLAB in Auburn in November 1999. I will never forget that her workshop was happening on a morning when the annual Veterans Day celebration...
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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