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PAUL E NELSON

Buy the book, $11.99.

Buy the book, $11.99.

Michael Dylan Welch, who has been tracking my commitment to American Sentences for many years, made good on his promise to write a review of the book and wrote a very astute and fair one. I liked that he noted my allusion to a Jack Kerouac haiku and liked especially this paragraph, despite the use of the sixth word:

These and other Sentences show lifefulness, honesty, and an endless openness to whatever happens—not just to the experiences of life, but an openness to whatever ends up in the poems. In that regard they have much in common with Ginsberg’s approach to this form as well as to haiku. It’s an exploration of the aesthetics of Open Form, or what Olson called “composition by field,” which Paul explains as being “what comes into one’s consciousness,” underscoring that “The practice of writing a daily American Sentence will change that field, if one is open to change” (9).

The review appears in the latest edition of the Raven Chronicles and bully for them for running so many reviews in an age when they seem a lost art.

See also Greg Bem’s review: https://queenmobs.com/2016/01/review-paul-e-nelsons-american-sentences-apprentice-house-2015/