Listen Here:

“Over the past decade or so, nobody has done more for the Pacific Northwest than Paul Nelson.” –Sam Hamill. Paul E. Nelson talks with Roxi Power about his forthcoming book, DaySong Miracle (Past 62) from Carbonation Press. The two poet friends laugh, talk, and even sing some of Nelson’s lyrical lines in his long investigative and spiritual poems.

Ever the teacher and professional interviewer, Paul elegantly unpacks how his poetic ancestors–“antepesados”–from Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, and Brenda Hillman–among the many poets he has interviewed, have influenced his Projective, Organic, and Poetic Cosmology involving Spiritual Ecology, bioregionalism, and connection to place.

Poet/interviewer Paul E. Nelson is the son of a labor activist father and Cuban immigrant mother. He founded the Cascadia Poetics LAB & the Cascadia Poetry Festival. Books include ⁠Cascadian Prophets (Interviews 1999-2023)⁠ (2024),  ⁠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). Co-Editor of Cascadian Zen Volume I: Bioregional Writings on Cascadia Here and Now (2023, Watershed Press), Make it True meets Medusario (2019) (Spanish & English) and other anthologies. He’s Literary Executor for the late poet Sam Hamill and lives in Rainier Beach, alongside dəxʷwuqʷed Creek.