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PAUL E NELSON

Interview with Nate Mackey

Ominous Animacy: Notes on an interview with Nate Mackey Interviewing Allen Ginsberg in 1994 introduced me to a deeper sense of Open Form. Interviewing Michael McClure in 1995 introduced me to Projective Verse. Reading the correspondence of Robert Duncan and Denise...

Intro to Reissue of McClure’s Specks

It was on my 50th birthday that I received an email from Garry Thomas Morse of Talon Books in Vancouver asking if I would be interested in writing the introduction to a reissue of Michael McClure’s 1985 book entitled Specks. I was honored and flabbergasted and...

Cascadia Poetry Interview

Crystal Curry is writing a piece on the Cascadia Poetry Festival and had a few questions for me. I thought I’d get the whole thing online here so you can see some of the background of the fest and my own interests/motivations. Paul — so I have access to...

Poetry Postcard Exercise

Poetry Postcard Exercise Ted Berrigan, Robin Blaser and Jack Spicer are among the more notable poets to engage in such a project. Berrigan’s book of them (A Certain Slant on Sunlight) was completed six months before his death in 1983. Alice Notley wrote: the cards as...

Post on Pacific Rim Poetics

For some reason, I did not get my Pacific Rim Poetics essay transferred over from OrganicPoetry.org to this here site. Today I corrected that. Here are the two epigraphs: If I open a magazine of contemporary poetry I rarely hear John Dryden, but almost always Li Po. –...