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PAUL NELSON
TOPICS - • Creativity • Performance • Personal Growth 
• Poetry • Self-Expression • Story Telling • Team Culture 
• Writing

PAUL NELSON - PROGRAMS

  • Poetics as Cosmology (Using Art to Build a Soul)
  • Sending Postcards to Strangers (Being Here and Now)
  • Quelling Editor’s Mind (To Write Better)
  • American Sentences (Catching the Shadow of the Moment 17 syllables at a Time)

PAUL NELSON - BIOGRAPHY

Poet & interviewer Paul E. Nelson
is the son of a labor activist father and Cuban immigrant mother. He founded the Cascadia Poetics LAB (formerly SPLAB (Seattle Poetics LAB)) & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Since 1993, CPL has produced hundreds of poetry events & 700 hours of interview programming with legendary poets & whole systems activists including Allen Ginsberg, Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Robin Blaser, Diane di Prima, Daphne Marlatt, Nate Mackey, George Bowering, Barry McKinnon, José Kozer, Brenda Hillman & many others.

Paul’s books include Haibun de la Serna (2022), A Time Before Slaughter/Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia (2020) American Prophets (interviews 1994-2012) (2018) American Sentences (2015, 2021) A Time Before Slaughter (2009) and Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies (2013). Co-Editor of Make It True: Poetry From Cascadia (2015), 56 Days of August: Poetry Postcards (2017) and Samthology: A Tribute to Sam Hamill (2019) Make it True meets Medusario (2019), he’s presented poetry/poetics in London, Brussels, Nanaimo, Qinghai & Beijing, China, has had work translated into Spanish, Chinese & Portuguese & writes an American Sentence every day.

Awarded a residency at The Lake, from the Morris Graves Foundation in Loleta, CA, he’s published work in Golden Handcuffs Review, Zen Monster, Hambone, and elsewhere. Winner of the 2014 Robin Blaser Award from The Capilano Review, he serves as Literary Executor for the late poet Sam Hamill, is engaged in a 20 year bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia and lives in Rainier Beach, in the Cascadia bioregion’s Cedar River watershed.

Paul is an active member (since 2004) of the Subud spiritual community, serving as Chair of the cultural wing of Subud, SICA-USA, as Local Helper, former webmaster of the Subud Pacific Northwest website, webmaster of the SICA and has had other positions in the past.

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PAUL NELSON - MEDIA

Paul's Book Descriptions

Haibun de la Serna

Paul Nelson’s Haibun moves with the spirit of Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s greguerías, one of the unclassifiable micro-genres Gómez invented in his quest to evade (literary) capture. Equally, but uniquely, evasive, Nelson’s poems are gorgeous mongrels combining the tradition of the haibun, the innovation of Gómez’s imagination, quotation of greguerías, an immaculate ear, and a terrific sense of humour. Through his daily practice, calling us to attention and concentration in the midst of the attenuation and distraction that surround us, Nelson’s language redeems the world over and over. — Michael Boughn, poet, co-editor of Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book


A Time Before Slaughter

In this epic poem, Paul Nelson re-enacts the history of Auburn, Washington, originally known as the town of Slaughter. Written in the spirit of William Carlos Williams, Charles Olson, and Michael McClure, A Time Before Slaughter explores the history of this Northwestern place from the myths of Native people to the xenophobia toward Japanese-Americans, from the urge to control to the hunger for liberation. Set against the backdrop of a towering dormant volcano (Mt. Rainier), the beauty of the verse pays homage to the beauty of the place. “Here’s one more big hunk of the American shoulder,” said poet Michael McClure. “As Olson carved his from the North East, Nelson takes his from the Pacific North West. It’s beautiful time-space in new words.”


American Prophets

A book of sixteen interviews taken from the best of over 600 conducted by Seattle poet Paul E Nelson. The book includes an A-List of luminaries who have dedicated their professional careers to deep, positive changes through a focus on whole-systems thinking and activation of creative approaches so individuals and society flourish. Grouped in three segments: Thinkers/Activists: Gloria DeGaetano, Rupert Sheldrake, Jean Houston, Larry Dossey, M.D. Poets: Jerome Rothenberg, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Sam Hamill, Michael McClure, Wanda Coleman, Brenda Hillman and Nathaniel Mackey and Technicians of the Sacred: Phyllis Curott, Bhagavan Das, E.Richard Atleo and Beaver Chief, the interviews show the way to a more just, healthy, creative and sustainable future.


American Sentences

This is a collection of American Sentences…A collection of 17-syllable sentences-the North American version of haiku, a form created by Allen Ginsberg-from a poet who has written one per day for 20 years.

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