12 or 20 (second series) questions with Paul E. Nelson

Poet & interviewer Paul E. Nelson is the son of a labor activist father and Cuban immigrant mother. Born on Chicago’s west side in 1961, he’s lived in King County since 1988. He founded the Cascadia Poetics Lab, the Cascadia Poetry Festival & co-founded the Poetry Postcard Fest. Books include DaySong Miracle (Past 62) (2024); 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); A Time Before Slaughter (2009). Co-Editor of Winter in America (Again: Poets Respond to 2024 Election (2025, Carbonation Press); Cascadian Zen Volume I: Bioregional Writings on Cascadia Here and Now (2023, Watershed Press), Make it True meets   (2019) (Spanish & English) and other anthologies. He’s Literary Executor for the late poet Sam Hamill, was awarded an Institute Residency at the Clyfford Still Museum in Denver, CO, and lives in Rainier Beach, alongside dxʷwuqʷeb Creek.

1a) How did your first book or chapbook change your life?

It established me in my own mind as a poet with a penchant for doing readings.

1b) How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?

The Singing Bullets of Soft Secession: & Other DaySongs is an extension/refinement of earlier work. It’s headed to more open territory and has more clarity and is more grounded, but continues to be informed by Michael McClure’s take on Charles Olson’s Projective Verse with a dash of Bernadette Mayer, Pierre Joris and Brenda Hillman. I could go on with the poets from whom I’ve stolen fire.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Jack Spicer said: “A poet is a time mechanic, not an enbalmer.”

3a) How long does it take to start any particular writing project?

Usually very quickly. It is intuitive.

3b) Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process?

Usually very quickly.

3c) Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?

I always carry a pocket journal, surround myself with books and pdfs and try not to mess with the poem too much after writing it. Denise Levertov said if you have to edit a poem extensively, it likely did not incubate long enough. That rings true for me. Editing that is consistent with the dharma position any poem comes from is tricky. Joanne Kyger said: “You accept what comes forth. You accept it. You're not trying to edit yourself. There are certain minimal standards of rewriting, like if I misspell something, which is frequently. I do a little tightening here and there, but I don't think you can really rewrite certain sentences or phrases. You lose the flow. You lose the spontaneity and syllables and inflections and vowels.”

4a) Where does a poem usually begin for you?

A phrase, a recognition of an inner state from which poetry often comes.

4b) Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?

I write short pieces and I write longer pieces, but I’d side with book consciousness.

5a) Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process?

Yes. I love public readings, if they are good. When it comes to “the private soul at any public wall” let’s just say that I don’t find that generative.

5b) Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Yes.

6a) Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing?

Experience first, explanation afterwards. I have a whole page of essays from writers that shed light on the theoretical: https://paulenelson.com/poetics/ Olson said that the poem is an event, not the record of an event, which seems to boil theory down to its essence. Dōgen’s notions of Uji (being time) and Ju Hoi (dharma position) are also very helpful and allied with this poetics. “No poetry of distinction without formal invention.” William Carlos Williams.

6b) What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work?

What is happening now. What does this present moment feel like.

6c) What do you even think the current questions are?

What is happening now. What does this present moment feel like.

7a) What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture?

“Antennae of the race” said Ezra Pound. One who can transcend ego and poke around in the realms that reveal the prophetic.

7b) Do they even have one?

There are as many roles as there are writers.

7c) What do you think the role of the writer should be?

“Antennae of the race” said Ezra Pound. One who can transcend ego and poke around in the realms that reveal the prophetic.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

Both. But a good editor and good proof-reader can save you from lots of trouble.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

“The worst thing that can happen to a writer is success.” Margareta Waterman. (She just died, bless her.) When a typical poet hits on success, they often want to crank out something similar, rather than come up with something fresh and original. This dictum gives me some solace.

10a & b)  How easy has it been for you to move between genres (poetry to essays)? What do you see as the appeal?

My two formats are poems and interviews and the interviews are then transcribed into a prose transcript. The only thing that complicates the transition between forms is creating enough psychic bandwidth to delve into someone else’s work well enough to conduct a good interview.

11a & b) What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?

I journal every morning. I write one 17 syllable poem every day. I write 50 postcard poems (mostly) between July 4 to August 31. I generally write two daysongs a year, Feb 1 and Sep1 1 roughly.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

Other writers.

13 - What fragrance reminds you of home?

Cedar boughs. Mugwort. My wife’s hair.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Music informs my work at least as much as any writing does. Some folks can hear it in the rhythms of my work, the juxtapositions, my Cuban maternal ancestors and a lifelong love of Jazz and preference for improvised music. All my work is an improvisation. Also, I will be a resident fellow at the Clyfford Still Museum from July 1 to 31, 2026.

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

Many I have mentioned above. Sam Hamill. William Carlos Williams. Nate Mackey’s seriality, along with that of George Bowering, Daphne Marlatt, George Stanley and Barry McKinnon. Andrew Schelling. Sharon Thesen. Wanda Coleman. Dōgen. Diane di Prima. Lorine Niedecker. Jason Wirth. Roxi Power. José Kozer. Theodore Roethke. Stephen Collis. Frank Zappa. Gil Scott-Heron. Carla Bley. Robin Blaser. Robert Duncan.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Before I was awarded the residency fellowship at the Clyfford Still Museum, i started collecting coffee table books of many artists, hoping to create poems or chapbooks from the material inside: Susan Point; Mayumi Oda; Paul Horiuchi; Kenneth Callahan; Jean Quick-to-See-Smith; 9th Street Women; Gaylen Hansen; Rick Bartow; Alfredo Arreguin and others.

I would like to take a group of poets on a literary/spiritual pilgrimage of Japan.

I would like to continue the serial poem which started as A Time Before Slaughter and continued with Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia.

I would like to publish at least three finished manuscripts: Sonetos de Cascadia,  Evolutionary Letters and FLEXIBLE MIND. I’d like to record the FLEXIBLE MIND poems with a band. Oh and a chapbook written after Carla Bley’s death:

I would like to see a biography done on Sam Hamill and have all of his essays re-published.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?

I was in radio for 26 years and could see myself doing that again, maybe as a community radio host, maybe as a weekly interviewer if I had a sponsor.

18 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?

My initials are PEN, so that was a good clue that I finally got when I was 32.

19a) What was the last great book you read?

Brenda Hillman’s new book Still House In the Desert: An Eco-Contemplation. There is much powerful work in an anthology I co-edited: Winter in America (Still. 

19b) What was the last great film?

Broken English: A Moving Portrait of Marianne Faithfull

Perfect Days (Wim Wenders)

20 - What are you currently working on?

The 10th Cascadia Poetry Festival, prepping for my Clyfford Still Museum residency, Los Cerezos Literary Festival (2027), Poetry Postcards.

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

The Capilano Review issue 4.6 (spring 2026) : love bends / the mover: The Roy Miki Issue

The texts and artworks in this issue come together within and across many of Roy’s varied communities: artistic, activist, academic, and Asian Canadian among all of these, considering subjects like asiancy, archives, and, crucially, Roy’s imperative to action as a few more principles within his astonishingly imaginative praxis. The alliterative synchronicity here all the while attempts to return readers to the materiality of language that roots Roy’s work. As Michael Barnholden, editor of Miki’s Flow: Poems Collected and New, affirms: “Roy’s first language was language.” (“Editor’s Note,” Emily Fedoruk and Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross)

I’m very pleased to be able to go through the latest issue of The Capilano Review [see my review of the three fiftieth anniversary issues--3.46-3.48--here; my review of 3.41 here; my review of 3.34 here; my review of 3.33 here; my review of 3.32 here; my review of 3.31 here; my review of 3.30 here, etc], produced as “love bends / the mover: The Roy Miki Issue,” celebrating the work and influence of the late Vancouver writer, teacher, activist, archivist and editor Roy Miki (1942-2024) [launching in Vancouver, by the by, on July 17]. As editors Emily Fedoruk and Jacquelyn Zong-Li Ross write as part of their introduction: “In circling the too-many possible places from which to ‘begin’ this note, we have often returned to the words of so many others who are forever moved and changed by Roy Miki.” They reference Phinder Dulai, for example, who offered this piece up at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics not long after Miki died. Literary activity, or even cultural activity generally, seems so rarely acknowledged in Canada (only occurring, if at all, once someone retires or dies), so these moments of homage, especially in memoriam, become essential for any kind of creative ecosystem.

For those unaware of Miki’s literary output, specifically his poetry, you should pick up Flow: Poems Collected and New, edited by Michael Barnholden (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2018) [see my review of such here], a book of some six hundred pages, covering all five of his published poetry collections—saving face: poems selected, 1976-1988 (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 1991), random access file (Red Deer AB: Red Deer College Press, 1995), Surrender (winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry; Toronto ON: Mercury Press, 2001), There (Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2006) and Mannequin Rising (New Star Books, 2011)[see my review of such here]. certainly well known as an editor and critic, from his years of West Coast Line to a collection of essays, a bibliography of George Bowering and editing Roy K. Kiyooka’s posthumous selected poems [see my review of such here] and bpNichol's posthumous critical writings, Miki is perhaps still best known for his years fighting for and finally achieving redress from the Canadian federal government for the internment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. One can best describe his decades of writing, editing, activism and teaching as a community-based focus on questions about identity, citizenship, race, and place.

dear roy,

 

this break between our years

makes the arch of a bridge you ride

into vaporous clouds (“dear roy,” shō yamagushiku)

This special issue of The Capilano Review offers work by Michael Barnholden, Carolyn Nakagawa, Yoriko Guillard, Larissa Lai, Nicole Markotić, Cindy Mochizuki, Fred Wah, Yilin Wang, Echo Quan, Tiziana La Melia, Vivek Sharma, Gloriah Amondi, Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi, Sena Cleave, shō yamagushiku, Wayde Compton, Daphne Marlatt, Rita Wong and Ranbir K Banwait, whether as direct tribute or response, or as indirect continuation of Miki’s decades of attention and labour. A play of language across language; a cross-section, that suggests and even explores further depths. The issue includes direct responses, but also pieces from those who might walk one of the many paths, so to speak, that Miki worked so hard to forge. Cindy Mochizuki, for example, provides “a textual and visual response” to Miki’s poem “Flow Nation,” from his collection, There. Larissa Lai offers “Rising Mist: Five Haibun for Roy” which are quite stunning (and hopefully part of an eventually-forthcoming collection, certainly). Wah offers some further lines of thoughtful lyric, of reminiscence, as does Nicole Markotić, providing an intimate detailing of Miki and Miki’s lyric in Winnipeg, upon first meeting him there. On his part, Wayde Compton provides the first part of an extended epic-in-progress, “Epistles to Oya: An Epic,” that stretches across an incredible canvas:

In the commander’s quarters, gathering
washing, she stopped, and her shape 

formed in the ornate lead-framing looking-
glass across the mantle: her self a 

stutter, a ripple in silver, foxed, a flash
of seeing; and in her cradling 

arm, swaddled warm, the worn
leather at her hip as she worked, the two 

oblong in the moment, together ahead
of missing, of breaking. And above 

his bed a painting, a flattery, this
commander, his eyes shadows, his face 

a simmer, a smear of power, at his neck
a chain, a locket on it, a spiral 

engraving of a ram’s horn there in
gold, a circling 

back upon itself. It hung
in paint as in life
covering his heart.

Echo Quan offers an intriguing sequence of text and photography, another form Miki had been exploring himself across a number of years. Translator and poet Yilin Wang offers three poems, the first of which, “mother tongue,” begins: “what is your mother tongue after you were / hoisted away from china at the age of four, and only // recovered the brushstrokes of your grandma;s name / by chance a decade later?” Highlights are almost too numerous to mention. I was also intrigued by the multiple pages of drawings, and again and again now that we know we know we know, by Sena Cleave, introduced with this short statement by the artist:

The curved lines in and again and again now that we know we know we know take after Roy Miki’s use of parenthesis in his poetic work. in poems like “Dome’s Story” and “The Fronds on Galiano,” I noticed how Miki would open parentheses without later closing them – sometimes opening multiple in a single poem – evoking a margin that continuously grows. Reflecting on Miki’s writing and activism (the latter of which he has described as a continuous process of change and negotiation) during the current rise in anti-migrant policies, I began drawing parentheses with coloured pencils, repeating and layering them until the parentheses took on a structural role in the composition, similar to how a stitch functions in embroidery, or how a row of thread functions in weaving. and again and again now that we know we know we know continues my inquiry into textiles, agriculture, and other repetitive forms of labour, using materials such as thread, fabric, and pine needles to think through themes of precarity, sustenance, and persistence.

Literature, I’ve heard it said, is less a continuous thread than a constellation of interconnected hubs, from which so much activity emerges, and Miki was one of those very important touchstones for multiple generations of writers, academics, readers and thinkers, well beyond his years teaching at Simon Fraser University (although a number of these contributors can be counted as some of Miki’s former students). As well, this is not the first special issue on Miki and his work, as the late journal that he founded, West Coast Line, produced a special issue, titled “Miki,” as issue #57 (42.1: spring/summer 2008), guest edited by Fred Wah [see my review of such here]. As Wah beings in his introduction to that issue, a consideration that could be equally applied to this current volume:

This issue of West Coast Line is a tribute to its founder, Roy Miki. It is not intended as collection of anecdotal or hagiographical testimonials but, rather, a collection of writing from some of the writers who have cohabited Roy’s extensive cultural community over the past 40 years. Writing was solicited to reflect not only the moment of production but also to reflect to Roy a partial sense of the threads of his own creative and intellectual milieu which he has generated through a lifetime of writing, thinking, and activism.

my new poetry title, edgeless (Caitlin Press) is now available!

An acrobatic cascade of poem-letters that bring you right up close to the ordinary intimacies of life

edgeless is written as a collection of poetic sequences that illuminate the extraordinary ordinary, travelling across time and space as letters to family, friends, and contemporaries. From epistolary notes composed to his wife during her time at Banff, and a Covid-era call-and-response with Denver poet Julie Carr, to an elegy for his friend, the late Prince George poet Barry McKinnon, the poems in edgeless hop, skip, and jump through everyday intimacies and commentary. With mclennan’s usual flair and flourish for acrobatic, inventive language, edgeless writes the world from within, as his words leave you pressed right up against it.

Author of My Heresies, Alina Stefanescu, said, “The world is a vampire, according to the Smashing Pumpkins. But the world is also everything that is the case, according to Ludwig Wittgenstein, and – in this case—rob mclennan brings his own “edgeless” epistolary form to bear on one of the oldest traditions in poetics, namely, the directed address in the form of a letter. Somewhere between Edmond Jabès’ “Letter from Yukel to Sarah” in The Book of Margins and Joe Wenderoth’s Letters to Wendy’s, one encounters mclennan’s “edgeless” letters to his wife, between time-space, Facetime, and twitter, the “gust of err” that waits and imagines the other. And the estuaries “for/with Julie Carr,” peopled by the winged concerns of Carr’s poems, attached to hope for life borne of poetry and friendship. We write to each other to imagine a future outside the given of capitalist realism. We write the other and the other writes us and the world we adore calls this “poetry.” The world calls this “a book.” The poet in me implores you to read it.”

edgeless (9781773861890) is published by Caitlin Press and distributed by the University of Toronto Press. It will be available to order from bookstores across Canada.

see the essay i wrote on the collection here : cover artwork by Aoife McLennan

The author of more than fifty books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, rob mclennan has won the John Newlove Poetry Prize, been shortlisted multiple times for the Archibald Lampman Award, longlisted for the ReLit Award, longlisted for the Robin Blaser Poetry Contest via The Capilano Review, and longlisted twice for the CBC Poetry Prize. The editor/publisher of above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal], he was writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta for the 2007-2008 academic year, and is the current Artistic Director of VERSeFest: Ottawa’s International Poetry Festival. Born in Ottawa, rob mclennan is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair.