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.
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...
88. Lesser Quantico
Am reading The Practice of Outside again, again from the Collected Jack Spicer so I can see what notes I made the first time I read it. (It has since been published in Robin Blaser's Collected...
Organic in Cascadia (translated for Brazilians)
José Kozer has been kind enough to connect me with a Brazilian poet Francisco Dos Santos who is translating and publishing a short essay I wrote for the Convergence on Poetics symposium at UW...
Allen Ginsberg Interview, Parts 9 & 10
In advance of the 12th Ginsberg Poetry Marathon, I'm presenting excerpts from my 1994 interview with Allen. 9. Trungpa on Kerouac PN: Tell us about the . . . Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied...
Allen Ginsberg Interview, Part 8
In advance of the 12th Ginsberg Poetry Marathon, I'm presenting excerpts from my 1994 interview with Allen. 8. 1st Thought, Best Thought AG: Yes, it is the title of a book by Chogyam Trungpa...
Allen Ginsberg Interview, Part 7
In advance of the 12th Ginsberg Poetry Marathon, I'm presenting excerpts from my 1994 interview with Allen. 7. Steal This Poem (poem) You can hear highlighted excerpts from the interview...
Allen Ginsberg Interview, Part 6
In advance of the 12th Ginsberg Poetry Marathon, I'm presenting excerpts from my 1994 interview with Allen. 6. On Whitman AG: We were gonna talk about Whitman, remember? PN: That’s exactly where I...
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...
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...
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.
Check out more of what the Lab does here, and listen to more current and archival podcasts on Spotify or on our website.
To get original poetry right in your mailbox this summer, check out the Poetry Postcard Fest.