Print version record.

By what narrow path is the ineffable silence of Zen cleft by the scratch of a pen? The distilled insights of forty years, Norman Fischer's Experience: Thinking, Writing, Language, and Religion is a collection of essays by Zen master Fischer about experimental writing as a spiritual practice. Raised in a Conservative Jewish family, Fischer embraced the twin practices of Zen Buddhism and innovative poetics in San Francisco in the early 1970s. His work includes original poetry, descriptions of Buddhist practice, translations of the Hebrew psalms, and eclectic writings on a range of topics from Homer to Heidegger to Kabbalah. Both Buddhist priest and participant in avant-garde poetry's Language movement, Fischer has limned the fertile affinities and creative contradictions between Zen and writing, accumulating four decades of rich insights he shares in Experience. Fischer's work has been deeply enriched through his collaborations with leading rabbis, poets, artists, esteemed Zen Buddhist practitioners, Trappist monks, and renowned Buddhist leaders, among them the Dalai Lama. Alone and with others, he has carried on a deep and sustained investigation into the intersection of writing and consciousness as informed by meditation. The essays in this artfully curated collection range across divers, fascinating topics such as time, the Heart Sutra, God in the Hebrew psalms, the supreme "uselessness" of art making, "late work" as a category of poetic appreciation, and the subtle and dubious notion of "religious experience." From the theoretical to the revealingly personal, Fischer's essays, interviews, and notes point toward a dramatic expansion of the sense of religious feeling in writing. Readers who join Fischer on this path in Experience can discover how language is not a description of experience, but rather an experience itself: shifting, indefinite, and essential. -- Provided by publisher

Intro -- Contents -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- I. Early Takes -- Manifesto on Writing -- The Poetics of Emptiness -- On Difficulty in Writing -- The Name -- For Tyuonyi -- Zen / Poetry -- Explanations About My Poetry for Kenyon College Students -- In the American West: Portrait Photos by Richard Avedon -- The One-Stroke Paintings of Kazuaki Tanahashi -- Waltzing Matilda by Alice Notley -- Total Absence and Total Presence in the Work of Barrett Watten -- Ted Berrigan, American Poet, 1934-1983 -- Ernest Hemingway, Selected Letters, 1917-1961 -- The Poetics of Lived Experience and the Concept of the Person -- Modernism, Postmodernism, and Values -- II. Are You Writing? -- Are You Writing? -- On Buddhist Writing -- Do You Want to Make Something Out of It? Zen Meditation and the Artistic Impulse -- Bewilderment -- Beyond Language -- Phrases and Spaces -- Blizzard of Depictions -- Saved from Freezing: Spiritual Practice, Art Practice -- Attention en Route: Buddhism and American Avant-Garde Poetry, a Personal View -- On Questioning -- An Everyday Zen Letter, Mid-June 2012, Muir Beach -- III. Beyond Thinking -- Poetry and Faith -- Introduction to Beyond Thinking: A Guide to Zen Meditation by Zen Master Dogen -- Introduction to Opening to You: Zen-Inspired Translations of Psalms -- Preface to Paul Naylor's Jammed Transmission -- Afterword to Training in Compassion: Zen Teachings on the Practice of Lojong -- On Stephen Ratcliffe's Portraits &amp -- Repetition: Seeing/Hearing/Writing -- A Page for Phil -- Review of Philip Whalen's Overtime: Selected Poems -- Activity Is the Only Community: The Writing of Leslie Scalapino -- On Hank Lazers Elegies and Vacations -- A Short Note on the Visual Poetry of Whalen, Grenier, and Lazer -- A Note on Charles Bernstein's Attack of the Difficult Poems -- On the Heart Sutra -- On Dogen's Shobogenzo.

Rethinking Ritual -- IV. Experience -- A Few Words About Emptiness -- Light(silence)word -- The Violence of Oneness -- On God for Sue -- Hank Lazer-Norman Fischer Interview, July 2010 -- For the Poem Itself-A Language View: An Interview with Norman Fischer by Monica Heredia and Denise Newman -- Sixty-Five -- Counting, Naming -- Late Work -- Imagination -- Experience.