Charles Bernstein
Blaser's Astonishment Tapes and Fischer's Experience: Discount offer
“The Astonishment Tapes will now take its place within the growing field of international research about postwar American poetry's important contribution to world literature. Miriam Nichols has once again done exceptional scholarship.”
—Peter Gizzi
“One of the great pleasures of this book is the glimpse it gives of another, more private Blaser than one we encounter in his collected poems and essays.”
–Ben Friedlander
Norman FIscher's Experience is the fruit of a life’s work in Zen (and other religious practice) as well as in poetry. It is mature, syncretic, wide-ranging, and open-hearted. Fischer is able to find common ground between Judeo-Christian and Buddhist beliefs or between Zen and the writing life without eliding the differences and contradictions. When he says that, in a certain type of Zen meditation, ‘you allow the phrases to come forward to you as if they were alive,’ I (as a poet) know precisely what that means. In these essays, Fischer accomplishes it.”
—Rae Armantrout, author of Versed, Just Saying, and Itself
“If only I had practiced a Buddhist form of meditation during my lifetime,
then I might not need this book so badly.
If only I had been educated by Norman Fischer.
If only I understood before what I understand now,
after reading Experience.
If only I had studied Dogen.
If only I could have such calm as is provided in these pages.
If only, if only!
Now I can carry the book around with me.
And at least I can give it to young friends.
But really and truly, I wish I had had this book before.”
—Fanny Howe
“Experience is not so much criticism or polemic as it is a guide to living one’s life inside and outside of poetry, and of making that life consonant with one’s art."
—Susan Schultz
