The Devices

by Norman Fischer

Poetry. "Those of us who think about the reality of things do not do so because we have plenty of time. Reality is not a fixed and immutable attribute of things but a process, a fast or slow unfolding. And we don't know with certainty that reality has been given limitless time. Norman Fischer's urgent sensitivity to the metamorphoses at hand makes his writing real"--Lyn Hejinian.

62 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1987

About the author

Zoketsu Norman Fischer (born 1946) is an American poet, writer, and Soto Zen priest, teaching and practicing in the lineage of Shunryu Suzuki. He is a Dharma heir of Sojun Mel Weitsman, from whom he received Dharma transmission in 1988.

Reviews

[Drew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes connecting with a poet is a matter of finding the book that's your portal. For Norman Fischer, I may have found the right doorway. This early collection, which I believe is third of over thirty, had that appealing mix of fresh and familiar that can strike one as a reader landing upon something newly engaging. As much one long poem as 62 interrelated entries, "The Devices" has a whimsicality that nods to Gertrude Stein, both in its elliptical exuberance ("it is very much too much to be very much too much") and its curious syntax ("$8.95, $2.95, $3.95 beat and winding up and down") as it does to the cut ups of William Burroughs (punctuation and capitalization don't always follow conventional logic and a thought can be aborted mid-sentence). I found some of its proclamations incredibly amusing ("there is time to eat and time to poop but no time for poetry") and jarring ("there's no stopping you except death") and curious ("I do not belong to the school of causation or the school of no causation"). "to be original is the only excuse the poet may have," writes Fischer and then he proves it.