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PAUL E NELSON

Robin Blaser’s Last Interview

I was searching for my interview with Robin Blaser online and it appears the link that was the best, from Lou Rowan’s Golden Handcuffs Review, is down and I’m going to rectify that here. Actually two interviews I did, the second at the suggestion of Lou,...

After The Japanese 9-12

When one writes poetry from the practice of outside, you can go back and look at poems 10 months old and marvel at the consciousness there because in a way, it’s not you. As drummer Hamid Drake told me after a legendary concert with William Parker and the late...

Animating Cascadia Western Lit Conference Notes

I am set to leave for Victoria on the Clipper and make a presentation Thursday morning at the Western Literature Association’s annual conference on a panel with Andy Meyer and Nadine Maestas. They added to our panel a woman doing a paper on Tess Gallagher. What...

474. Ghost Training

The fourth poem from the 2014 August Poetry Postcard Fest, this one continues in the theme of the notion of The Practice of Outside. That an ancestor of Levertov was said to be able to understand the language of birds would make her more likely to understand the...

Peter Culley’s Hammertown

The first moment I heard about Peter Culley’s serial poem Hammertown, immediately I intuited that it was similar to what I was doing with A Time Before Slaughter. It would be a couple of years before I would get to confirm that, on the occasion of Culley’s...