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PAUL E NELSON

Cascadia Poetry Festival 8 Paul E Nelson at the microphone

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

Margin Shift

by | Jun 14, 2020

I'm delighted to be doing another Zoom-Because-of-Shelter-in-Place reading, this time for  Margin Shift, Thursday June 18 at 7pm. As its name implies, Margin Shift is the most diverse reading series...

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The Poetry Foundation

The Poetry Foundation

by | Jun 10, 2020

Dispatches from the Poetry Wars was a great little, shit-stirring website that reminded us that poetry wars are ongoing and critical, if they lead to dialog. Community happens only when there is...

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Deborah Poe

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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Deborah Poe on "flagging the apocalypse pageantry"

by Paul E Nelson