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
Habib in Seattle
Looking back, it was October 2011 when I accepted a friend request from a man I had never met, or heard of, named El Habib Louai. He said he was a Moroccan poet and I tend to accept friend requests...
428. Age of Wind (For Judy Jensen)
OK, I jumped the gun on the 2013 August POetry POstcard Fest. Though I am posting here a month after writing and sending the first poem of 2013 (& my 428th postcard poem) I started writing the...
Talk at North Cascades Institute
El Habib Louai concludes his tour of Cascadia on Thursday, August 15, 2013, at 7p as he talks to participants in this year's Beats on the Peaks event, produced by the North Cascades Institute. Habib...
Ghost Tantra Video
The Four Hoarse Men were down a hoarse at the last Ginsberg Marathon, June 1, 2013, at the Spring Street Center, but we did have Jaci Conger taping and here's some of the wreckage of our versions of...
Young Moroccan Poet & Beat Scholar Visits Seattle
El Habib Louai reads in Seattle Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Details here: https://splab.org/2013/08/moroccan-poet-el-habib-louai-visits-seattle/ We invite you to attend and spread the word....
August Poetry Postcard Fest
The final list is out and 302 poets have joined us for the August Poetry Postcard fest this year. There are poets from Alabama, Alaska, Alberta, Arizona, Australia, British Columbia, California,...
American Sentences-June, July
I told this story on Facebook last week: After a ride on the 358, I get where John Burgess is coming from with his Aurora bus updates. I sat down in the back row next to this guy who started talking...
Tin Umbrella Suggests Hillman City’s Coming Up
Mer and I moved from Columbia City to Hillman City in October 2011. The neighborhood just south of Columbia City, it's still more diverse than Columbia City and (as of this writing) has none of the...
Notes on The Practice of Outside: Robin Blaser’s Divine Real
Notes on The Practice of Outside: Robin Blaser’s Divine Real (pdf) Before I knew Robin Blaser’s work, I knew of Robin Blaser, having found out about him through my early poetry investigations of...
Penultimate Postcard Update
I got the latest postcard update from Brendan McBreen (see below) with the new list of 243 people, easily a new postcard record! Am a little stunned and very excited about the fest and (as noted...
POPO is Here (Early)
Faced with the prospect of not having any (in person) poetry readings for a while due to the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19) and self-isolation for several weeks, the SPLAB Board agreed with my notion...
(Streaming) Lyric World Conversations with Koon Woon
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED DUE TO THE CURRENT COVID-19 PANDEMIC I was delighted to be part of an event that features a local poet who has been part of the Seattle literary scene for many years and...
Plugging Into the Current: The Immediacies of Daphne Marlatt’s Writing
I had a flurry of activity about a month ago. I prepared a talk for a poet's society with which I was engaged for a couple of months to serve as a sort of "dress rehearsal" for a talk at a...
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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