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
Brian Love Memorial
I attended the Memorial for Brian Love at the Auburn Adventist Academy Church yesterday (7.17.13) and recorded the service. (Hear the audio of the first half by clicking here. The 2nd half starting...
Postcard Update
The man coordinating the list for the 2013 August POetry POstcard Fest, Brendan McBreen, informs us that 179 poets have signed up so far and the cut off date is less than two weeks away. (His update...
Writing or Re-Writing
I was fascinated to see a post from one of my Facebook friends, Jim Andrews, linking to a piece in the Boston Globe about how the practice of extensive revision of one's writing is a 20th Century...
Brian Love Update
As I posted on the SPLAB blog* last week, Brian Love, a longtime SPLAB volunteer and all-around handyman, was killed by a drunk driver on July 5th. The man accused of the crime, Floyd Gonzales, will...
90. Slow Down Tahoe Driver (For Brian Love)
Elegy for Brian Love
An elegy for my friend Brian Love, who helped run SPLAB in Auburn 1997-2004, helped me with my syndicated public affairs radio show and was killed by a drunk driver on the morning of July 5, 2013.
Another Postcard Bargain
I'm getting ready for the August Poetry Postcard Fest, which starts on the 27th. It's the 7th year we've done this and after seeing a link to a talk Ted Berrigan gave in 1979 on his Sonnets, I had a...
89. Pocket Fetch
The Tao of Postcards
The absolute tranquility is the present moment. Though it is at this moment, there is no limit to this moment, and herein is eternal delight. – Hui-nen (First published June 24, 2013) In 2000 I was...
August Postcard Poem Fest Returns
From Brendan McBreen: Once more it is almost August! The August Poetry Postcard Project is an exercise in responding to other poets. You write a poem a day for the month of August, write it on a...
A Time Before Slaughter/Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia
The tenth anniversary edition of A Time Before Slaughter is coming out on April 11 with a launch at Open Books. My publisher, Apprentice House, is adding a whole separate book to the new edition,...
Interview with Shin Yu Pai (Ensō)
Shin Yu Pai's new book, Ensō is categorized as a künstlerroman, an artist's novel, a class of bildungsroman or apprentice novel, that deals with the maturation of a young artist. Yet this is not...
Cascadian Zen Interview with Jason Wirth
“Cascadian Zen” is an event at Seattle University on February 14 and 15, 2020 that’s organized loosely around exploring the relationship between the Cascadian bioregion as it intersects with Zen...
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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