Workshop Exercises have been developed since 1997 at over 400 workshops.
Click on one of the links below to view and print the handout.
American Sentences
American Sonnets
Berrigan College Sonnet Exercise
Cover Poem
Duo Corpse Exercise
Exquisite Corpse Exercise
Fast Speaking Mammal
Grid Exercise
Haibun Tips
I Remember (After Joe Brainard)
Kerouac Blues Exercise
Phrase Acrostic
Poetry Postcard Exercise
Sei Shonagon List Exercise
Tribe Exercise
Click here for a course outline of Paul Nelson’s Keeping Your Hand (Foot, Spleen) In It first offered at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle in July, 2009.
Click here for a course outline of The Personal Mythology of Organic Poetry course, first offered at the Richard Hugo House in Seattle in Winter, 2009.
Pages
- Names of Thangka Deities or Chinese Dishes
- 3rd Qinghai Lake Poetry Festival (2011)
- A Time Before Slaughter
- About Paul
- American Prophets
- American Sentences
- About Form: What Are American Sentences?
- American Sentences 2001
- American Sentences 2002
- American Sentences 2003
- American Sentences 2004
- American Sentences 2005
- American Sentences 2006
- American Sentences 2007
- American Sentences 2008
- American Sentences 2009
- American Sentences 2010
- American Sentences 2011
- Anne Waldman/Andrew Schelling Interview and John Olson on American Sentences
- Book a Workshop
- Buy Interview MP3′s
- CV
- Home
- Interviews
- Listen
- Organic Poetry
- Along the Rim
- Amalio Madueno’s Response to Hell
- Changing a Culture (A Look at Cultural Modernism and Free Market Verse)
- Crafting the Organic: George Bowering’s Kerrisdale Elegies
- Cuba Pictorial Essay, February – March, 2005
- Dec 9, 2006: Robin Blaser Book Launch
- Dualism and Olson’s Antidote
- Evolving the Organic: The Letters of Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov
- Innovative Northwest Poets
- Inside Dolphin Skull: Michael McClure
- Interview with Robin Blaser: Tracking the Fire
- Introduction to Organic Poetry
- Lesley University Masters Study Plan
- Organic Manifesto
- Organic Poetry
- Organic Poetry Essays
- Pacific Rim Poetics
- Paul Nelson Rain Taxi Interview (Greg Bem)
- Paul Nelson Semester 3 Annotated Bibliography
- Projective Verse (Charles Olson, 1950)
- Projective Verse: The Spiritual Legacy of the Beat Generation
- Response to McClure’s “Mysteriosos”
- Summary of Program Work
- The Meat Lab of Michael McClure: Mysteriosos and Other Poems
- The Oosumich of Open Form: Writing as Vision Quest
- The Sound of the Field (Olson)
- Walt Whitman: Poet of Parturition
- What is Consciousness?
- What is Open Form Poetry
- Why Poetry Matters: An Interview with Sam Hamill
- Writing out of Hell: The Practice of William Carlos Williams and the Opening of the Field
- Paul E Nelson Resume
- Pig War
- Qinghai Sunflowers
- SPLAB
- Testimonials
- The Long Walk
- Workshops

