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
461. Arthur Tulee, Toppenish, WA – Losing Time
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460. Jovan Mrvos, Decatur, IN – Church of Coltrane
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459b. Kristen Cleage, Atlanta, GA – Full Sunflower Moon
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459. Kara Synhorst, Sacramento, CA – Cost of Being
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458. Linda Lee Harper, Augusta, GA – How Many Habibs
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457. Amy Miller – Ashland, OR – A Taste of This Side
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91. Berber City Poems (For El Habib Louai)
It is a month after El Habib Louai visited Seattle, postcards composed during his visit are appearing on my blog and I am reliving the moments through the poems as if they are happening again. Part...
456. L. Lisa Lawrence, Tacoma, WA – Shooting Hozomeen
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Deconstructing For Kurt Cobain
I had a poem published in the anthology culled from featured readers at the Planet Earth Poetry reading series in Victoria. Yvonne Blomer, the series curator and co-editor of the Poems from Planet...
455. Heather Mydosh, Independence, KS – Kerouac & Moonrise
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Sam Green’s ATBS Binding
Huge gratitude goes out to Washington's first Poet Laureate, Sam Green, who has bound my new book A Time Before Slaughter/Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia. He did it a week or so ago and sent...
Lewis MacAdams Dead
This was in the L.A. Times tonight: Lewis MacAdams, a poet and crusader for restoring the concrete Los Angeles River to a more natural state and co-founder of one of the most influential...
Documenting Pandemic
Thanks to POPO participant Linda Clifton, I learned about an essay by George Saunders in The New Yorker: A key paragraph for me: Are you keeping records of the e-mails and texts you’re getting, the...
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.