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Published in collaboration with Chax Press
Precisely the Point Being Made offers rare evidence of a poet whose forms are everywhere vital and exploratory, one “conscious of each breath.” Yet for Norman Fischer, poetry is not the site of grandiose claims. It is an instrument of attention along the path one travels, out in the morning, back as the light fades (“in midst of being all around”). Presence before the body and before thought in all their illusoriness. A reader might then notice that the rest is silence. — Michael Palmer
Norman Fischer
Norman Fischer was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania in 1946. He attended college in upstate New York, the Midwest, and California. A Zen priest, he has trained under several American Zen teachers, and received Dharma Transmission in the Suzuki-roshi ... Read More
Praise for Precisely the Point Being Made
If Gertrude Stein were a Zen monk family man living on a farm by the ocean at the tail end of the century, she would be Norman Fischer.
— Kit Robinson.
When you focus on language, you begin to realize that it’s all language; in a sense, my fear or my confusion or my joy is as much as an object in the world, to me, as a chair is. Of course, it’s somewhat different — there’s a difference in degree — but fundamentally, when you get right down to where language is, I am describing joy to myself — that’s my experience of joy — the same way I’m describing a room to myself when I walk into it. And when you’re working on the level of language, there’s a great equality between inside and outside.
— Norman Fischer, interview at The Zen Site