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Open Books: Events
September 13, 2010 07:30 PM
NORMAN FISCHER & EMILY WARN
Norman Fischer is a Zen Buddhist priest as well as a poet, and his poetry reflects the presence, depth, and spark that come with such a vocation. His most recent collection is Questions/Places/Voices/Seasons ($16 Singing Horse Press), a title that prepares the reader for the richly varied sections within. Writing in lines sometimes expansive, sometimes skipping quick, he imbues his poems with an inquisitive, contemplative voice, a charming one both bold and humble -- "All I know about the world of things / I could muster in a moment in a teacup." His work explores with energetic care the perpetual and perpetually mysterious intermingling of thought and experience -- "The mind lights up the room and furniture appears." A former abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center, he is the founder and teacher for the Everyday Zen Foundation and co-founder of Makor Or, a Jewish meditation Center in San Francisco.
Joining Mr. Fischer is poet, essayist, teacher, and editor Emily Warn, whose own work has often explored the confluence of faith, language, and the world from which both arise. As she has written, "poetry links music and meaning every bit as powerfully and oddly as religious traditions do, inventing complicated, invisible relations." This evening she plans to share new work with us. The author of five collections, her most recent book is Shadow Architect ($15 Copper Canyon Press), an inventive and compelling consideration of the Hebrew alphabet. "Emily Warn is one tough poet," the Seattle Times wrote of her, "... she not only takes on God but also juggles the hot coals of memory and wrestles her way to an honest spiritual life." A founding editor of the website poetryfoundation.org, she now divides her time between Seattle and Twisp, Washington.
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