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 Hamill
Poet, Editor, Translator, Founder of Copper Canyon Press