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 & 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
