Poet, teacher and Chicago native Paul E. Nelson founded Global Voices Radio and co-founded the Northwest SPokenword LAB (SPLAB!) in Auburn, Washington. He holds a B.A. in Communications from Columbia College and an M.A. from Lesley University in Open Form (Organic) poetry. His poetry and essays have been published around the world in Dirt, The Argotist, The Raven Chronicles, Unlikely Stories, The Time Garden, Fulcrum, the OlsonNow blog and other publications, on and off-line and he has performed his work at a number of venues.
He has interviewed Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Michael McClure, Robin Blaser, Wanda Coleman, Jerome Rothenberg, Joanne Kyger, Eileen Myles, George Bowering and other North American poets and incorporates sound from those interviews in poetry workshops, having conducted at least 250.
Father of one, Rebecca Rose (born 1991), Paul is working on an epic poem re-enacting Auburn history titled A Time Before Slaughter and maintains a daily American Sentence writing practice.
In his understanding of Organic Poetry, the subject of his graduate work, the poem is itself an event, rather than simply the recording of an event. One might see the process through the lens of an Organismic paradigm, sympathetic to the theories of Alfred North Whitehead, and view the poem as an occasion of experience, or a snapshot or map of the mind acting in the moment.
Global Voices Radio
SPokenword LAB (SPLAB!)
Organic Poetry
American Sentences