Paul E Nelson

Haibun de La Serna Photo: Ode to Life by Bill Turner. Author's Bio: Poet/interviewer Paul E Nelson founded The Cascadia Poetics LAB & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Since 1993, CPL has produced hundreds of poetry events & 750 hours of interview programming with legendary poets & whole systems activists. Paul's books include 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) & Organic in Cascadia: A Sequence of Energies (2013) and several anthologies which he co-edited. Literary Executor for Sam Hamill, Paul is engaged in a 20 year bioregional cultural investigation of Cascadia and lives in Seattle in the Cedar River Watershed. Nelson comes to poetry not simply as a maker-of-poems, but as a way of life, a way of being. Furthering the tradition of sequential poetry established by Ezra Pound, Charles Olson, Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, Nelson's first major book, A Time Before Slaughter, interweaves local history with a personal mythology to create a cosmos. His is a poetics that reveals process rather than conclusion. His study and practice have revolutionized his approach to poetics. Eschewing the poem as a highly polished objet d'art made of words, his poetry tracks the movement of conscientiousness, or what Duncan de- scribed as "the dance of the intellect." Borrowing from the Medieval Japanese form hai- bun, a combination of prose and haiku, he adds a Latin American neo-barroco layering of language to create something uniquely his own. Sam HamillPoet, Editor, Translator, Founder of Copper Canyon Press

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.""...If the original Slaughter reads like an archeological elegy for a past consciousness virally erased by settler 'Dominism, ' the extended book turns that on its head, and lends us new instruments with which to re-inhabit place... Poetry need not romantically lament a lost reality, or limply critique hegemonic systems... In these poems, Cascadia isn't a lost place, an Atlantis, but an island, a 'vast metaphor for concentration...' something potential always waiting to be spontaneously inhabited and made true." --Matt Trease

Legendary poet Michael McClure expands upon Charles Olson's proprioceptive poetic with Aristotelian metaphysics, Lorca's duende, environmental awareness, and biological exploration.