THROUGH A WINDOW
by Norman Fischer
Imagine Norman Fischer’s career built on sitting and looking inward. Suddenly, Covid, and the whole world is sitting and looking inward (what choice did we have), so Fischer, adventurer that he is, starts writing Through a Window about sitting and looking out a window. This new world of looking outward then encounters language outside the window “some [other branch] Eu / Cal / Ip / Tus.” This strange quest into poetry appears to someone carefully prepared yet shocked as if by the unexpected for this moment of vision.
In his deadpan style, Fischer strikes a droll chord with the poem and the world together as “an object to be domesti- / cated one can grip / history in persons/ / places/tales/memory in looking / through distancespace at what’s / not gripped in hand.” Every few days for a year, these short, linked poems appeared on the page as the scene spread out before Fischer change.
Through a Window is not a spiritual quest as much as reading the thrust of short, poetic lines into a “factual factual / world.” Leaning forward into the language of landscape and drawing back into thought, Fischer’s poetry finds itself more realized through connecting inside and outside than either singularity can opine.
People are saying
Norman Fischer’s Through a Window is a phenomenological exploration, in verse form, of the meanings and processes of looking. It records the eternal feedback loop out-side (world) and inside (mind) until those distinctions just about blur. “[L]ooking,” Fischer writes, “is an innate impulse toward whole-ness.” The poem teems with the exquisite flora (cypresses, opium poppies, eucalyptus and plum trees) and fauna (sparrows, foxes, juncos, deer) of Fischer’s home in Muir Beach, and reading it feels like a kind invitation to sit there with him. —Nada Gordon
“Such sincere rock!” Therein lies the problem of nature transcription. If there is anything that meditation and writing practice have in common, it’s a “disciplined attention.” Let’s pressure that term: how is the attention to be “disciplined?” Or would it be better to allow the plurality of language to intervene, and disrupt any “recollection in tranquility?” No question Fischer’s is high value real estate—an apex of the aesthetic. Imagine reading it at the top of a 100-storey apartment pinnacle in New York. But the constraint is also the pandemic: this happy confinement to time and place was a duration not of one’s choosing, for which a lifetime of meditation and writing prepared one. Such is Norman Fischer’s singular vocation, a testimony to value in experience, a view from the top or cliff o’ertopping the waves, spread out, democratic.
—Barrett Watten
About the author
Norman Fischer is a poet and Zen Buddhist priest. His recent poetry titles include Selected Poems 1980-2013, There Was a Clattering as…, Nature, and Men in Suits. His translation of the Hebrew psalms, Opening to You, is widely read in both Jewish and Christian circles. University of Alabama published Experience: Essays on Thinking, Writing, Language, and Religion. He lives in Muir Beach with his wife Kathie, also a Zen priest. For more information see: