About this Event
Paul E. Nelson launches his new poetry collection The Singing Bullets of Soft Secession: & Other DaySongs, alongside a reading from fellow poet Nadine Maestas. They’ll be joined by Jason M. Wirth for a Q&A.
The Singing Bullets of Soft Secession: & Other DaySongs is a complication of 5 day-long writing ritual poems, DaySongs.
The daysong, a poem written in a 24 hour period (or the 16 or so hours you’re awake during a 24 hour period) was originally envisioned as an attempt to broaden the compositional range of the postcard poet, from the 12-14 lines that can fit onto a postcard to the 10-119 pages that can be written in a day. (119 if you’re Bernadette Mayer writing Midwinter Day.) The exercise was offered to participants in the Life as Rehearsal for the Poem workshop and then to participants in the 2022 Poetry Postcard Fest. It was based on Mayer’s experiment and the “Canto Diurno” of Pierre Joris.
The range (compositional and logopoetic) of a poet is a telltale sign into the depth and breadth of their consciousness and the daysong is part test, part ritual, part vision quest. Done properly, it is a dharma gate and is evidence of a particular dharma position. It is an occasion of experience unlike many artistic pursuits.
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 DaySong Miracle (Past 62); Cascadian Prophets (Interviews 1999-2023); Haibun de la Serna; A Time Before Slaughter/Pig War: & Other Songs of Cascadia; and American Sentences (17 syllable poems.) Co-editor of several anthologies, including Winter in America (Again, he was shortlisted for a 2010 Genius Award in Literature from The Stranger, awarded a residency at The Lake in 2012, by the Morris Graves Foundation and in July 2026, he was a Resident Fellow at the Clyfford Still Museum Institute in Denver, Colorado. He is Literary Executor for Sam Hamill.
Nadine Antoinette Maestas is a poet’s poet and believes that the empire of the sentence is an extremely oppressive totalitarian regime. She prefers the company of poems so much that she would rather read a bad poem than a good novel, but when she is not doing poetry, Nadine loves mountain biking and trail running in dangerous and remote places in the Northwest. Her hybrid poem play “Hellen on Wheels: A Play of Rhyme and Reason” was performed at California College of the Arts. She is the author of Imperialism As Sweet As Insult (Really Serious Literature Press), the co-author with Karen Weiser of "Beneath the Bright Discus” (Potes & Poets Press, 2000) and is a co-editor for the poetry anthology Make It True: Poetry from Cascadia. You can find more of her poems published in Snail Trail Press, Pageboy Magazine, Lyric &, The Germ, the bilingual anthology Make It True Meets Medusario, and Ofrenda Magazine. She has poems forthcoming in The Glittering Field: A Gathering of New Two-Spirit and Indigiqueer Poetry. She currently teaches at Cornish College of the Arts at Seattle University and in the MFA program at UW Bothell.
Dr. Jason M. Wirth is professor of philosophy at Seattle University and works and teaches in the areas of Continental Philosophy, Buddhist Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Environmental Philosophy. A Founding Editor of Watershed Press. Founded in Cascadia and concentrating on Cascadia, Watershed Press is a small press committed to publishing works that reflect the ecology, beauty, and complexity of this bioregion.
Event venue & nearby stays
The Elliott Bay Book Company, 1521 10th Avenue, Seattle, United States
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