“For Norman Fischer, poetry is not the site of grandiose claims. It is an instrument of attention along the path one travels, out in the morning, back as the light fades….” — Michael Palmer
Oakland & Minneapolis: O Books in collaboration with Chax Press (Oct, 1993)
“PRECISELY THE POINT BEING MADE offers rare evidence of a poet whose forms are everywhere vital and exploratory, one ‘conscious of each breath.’ Yet for Norman Fischer, poetry is not the site of grandiose claims. It is an instrument of attention along the path one travels, out in the morning, back as the light fades (‘in midst of being all around’). Presence before the body and before thought in all their illusoriness. A reader might then notice that the rest is silence.”
“If Gertrude Stein were a Zen monk family man living on a farm by the ocean at the tail end of the century, she would be Norman Fischer.”