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
Latest American Sentences
I was looking at the stats for this website yesterday and stunned to find over 5,000 hits on American Sentences, by far the most popular thing here. Thank you for your interest. I write today to...
85. Soul’s Same Ol’ (Over n Over)
It doesn't take much exposure to the work of Nate Mackey to propel me into my own poetic orbit. Perhaps as a gesture for the successful publication of an interview we did last summer, he sent a copy...
Hold The House Sparrow (translation)
The haibun I wrote for Maleea Acker (84. Hold The House Sparrow) has been translated into Chinese. I got this yesterday from Denis Mair: Hello Paul, Zhang Yuan, who is studying for a PhD in...
David Abel Tether, Float, Spare Room, 13 Hats
For years I was on the email list of Portland poet David Abel. The range of events promoted on that list went from experimental poetry readings to workshops, rare book exhibits to raga singing...
Chang’an Poetry Festival Hall of Fame
My 2011 trip to China continues to pay dividends. I'll explain in a moment. I was invited to China for the 2011 Qinghai Lake International Poetry Festival and traveled there with my wife Meredith...
Nate Mackey, Amerarcana
When I proposed to Nate Mackey that we do an interview on Nod House, which was and still is his latest book of poems, he asked me if I had a venue in mind for its publication. No, I said, but he did...
84. Hold The House Sparrow (For Maleea Acker)
During my recent stay in Victoria, I was the guest of Maleea Acker for a night. She was one of the Canadian poets who came down to read at our first Cascadia Poetry Festival and has recently...
Force Field: 77 Women BC Poets
Soon after I made plans to go to Victoria, BC, for the launch of the Poems from Planet Earth anthology (see this post), I found out the launch of another anthology was happening the next day in...
Poems from Planet Earth
As mentioned in my last post (Walking Victoria) in addition to some lovely photo opportunities and the best matcha ever, I attended the launch for a new anthology of poems made up of past readers at...
Walking Victoria
I think it was attending the Victoria School of Writing (RIP) Summer School session for a week in July 2005 that made me aware of the Planet Earth Poetry series in Victoria, BC. That was the week I...
Three Memorials for Judith Roche
On December 24, 2019, the Seattle Times published its obituary for Judith Roche. An excerpt: “My basic thing is that poetry is approaching the holy and it’s a translation of the sacred and it says...
PoPo Interviews
I am looking to interview at least ten postcard participants in the next few weeks to create some videos for a new PoPo website that will replace the current page on my cluttered personal site....
Make it True meets Medusario Review
Thank you Paul Constant, at the Seattle Review of Books, for the kind and (I think) perceptive review of an anthology I had a hand in bringing into the world. Make It True meets Medusario is indeed...
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.