Poetry: Norman Fischer
Introduction
by Hank Lazer
I have been following and reading Norman Fischer’s poetry for nearly thirty years, since we first appeared together in the anthology The Art of Practice: 45 Contemporary Poets and read together in San Francisco to launch the anthology. I first came to know Norman as a poet, and later as a Zen priest (who became my teacher). Even with this continuity of friendship and as a steady reader of Norman’s poetry, I would not have been able to predict the kinds of poems that appear in Skald in this selection of new work. That is a trait that we share as poets: a restless and destabilizing (as in avoiding repetition or a quest for “mastery”) exploration of ways to write poetry.
The pandemic and the attendant quarantining have led to an amazing outpouring of new writing from Norman. Recently, a book launch event celebrated THREE new books by Norman – Nature (Tuumba Press, 2021), There was a clattering as… (Lavender Ink, 2021), and When You Greet Me I Bow: Notes and Reflections from a Life in Zen (Shambhala, 2021). No two alike. The first two books (books of poetry), continue and deepen Norman’s exploration of writing through, with, and beside the writings of others, mixing collage, homage, impersonation, and critique. In his introduction to When You Greet Me I Bow, Norman offers a sense of the scope of his writing life (which is mirrored in the scope of his Zen practice):
All my life I have been obsessed with time, even as a child, and death, of course death: How does a day arrive and pass by? Where does it go when it’s done? And a person (like my grandfather, with whom we lived, and who died when I was seven): where does he go when he no longer appears in this sad world? Such lunatic musings drove me to poetry and to Zen, and a lifetime of more musing, scribbling, and sitting for hours, days, maybe years, decades, all told in deep silence. What is language? What is thinking, feeling, seeing, hearing? What is going on here? (xvii)
Though Norman has been a practitioner of Zen meditation for fifty years, it is rarely (if ever) directly a topic in his writing. I have asked him why that is, and he prefers not to thematize the meditation experience (which is ever varying), instead letting the poetry itself become a manner of meditation, open to the arising of language, thinking, and the unpredictable pathways open to human consciousness. Perhaps to thematize or write poetry about meditation would be an unnecessary redundancy.
In the new poems in Skald, Norman returns again and again to a good-humored consideration of what is a person: “I’m repeating myself mimicking another/ Person formerly me/ I recover and remember to be myself”. But who or what is this self? A fictitious changing entity? A place-holder? Nothing? To find out more about this thing called a person, we have poetry, and we have Norman’s poetry: “In our culturally democratic time/ Anyone can be and usually is a poet/ Therefore I shall be and am a poet too.” It is Norman’s tenderness & compassion that stand out to me, along with a humor that allows his own vulnerability and humility to appear: “Hi there. You are probably/ A person just/ As I am/ Also a/ Person being a person/ Is truly/ Some/ Thing/ Isn’t it?”
And if the practice of Zen, through meditation, is directed toward being fully in the present moment, Norman’s “The Mighty Pen,” with its sustained attention to the pen itself as he is writing, becomes a funny, engaging, smart exploration. His poetry is of, in, and as the moment – the poetry constitutes (another) way of being present. In a wonderfully non-dualistic mode of thinking, Norman recognizes at once the importance (with a history of poets proclaiming the elevated nature of their writing) and the unimportance of poetry simultaneously: “Because there are so many other things one must tend to/ More significant than poetry/ Which is as insignificant as it is significant”. Woven into the fabric of Norman’s poetry is a questioning – in a manner at once Jewish and Buddhist? – of what poetry is for and why we do it.
Norman is not without his influences – most especially Philip Whalen, John Ashbery, and Wallace Stevens, and 13th century Zen priest and ever-inspiring thinker and writer Dōgen. His influences, though, are really more like permissions and provocations rather than modes of writing to imitate.
To my way of thinking, there may not be a poet writing today in the US who is more important, timely, productive, unpredictable, and interesting. Perhaps Norman’s identification (and stature – surely, he is one of the most important Zen figures of our time) as a Zen priest may obscure the depth and range of his contribution as a poet. His Zen books are widely read and his dharma talks listened to by many. The poetry – compared to, say, the Zen poetry of writers such as Jane Hirschfield and Natalie Goldberg and Gary Snyder – has never really achieved a big audience, though that does not really trouble nor impede Norman. And it is not an either/or choice: traditional, recognizable, plain-spoken poetry or innovative, experimental poetry. It is a both/and, for there is a place, value, and context for many kinds of poetry. Perhaps, though, the many practitioners of Zen meditation who have come to appreciate the grace and unpredictability of consciousness and a life in language might also now savor and enjoy poetry such as Norman’s, which makes manifest the range and beauty (and the joy in exploration!) of our complex life in language. Which is simply my way of encouraging you to read and enjoy Norman’s ever-changing poetry.
On Noah Fischer
Easy enough to pay close attention to the stuff you make and to make it well, ignoring everything outside the studio. But when you begin to think about your work’s reception in the world, its social and political meaning and position, it gets, like they say, complicated. When you see your work sold to the wealthy, purchased, even, by hedge funds on spec. When you work in New York, art capital of the world, and experience the wrenching social whirl. What to do? Hobnob with the rich? Cozy up to the important critics, curators, and gallerists you meet at the parties and openings you make sure you are invited to?
And then you think about this more: study history, economics, politics; study art’s last century (or all its centuries, for that matter) and realize that excellence and fame have always been about money, position, and power. That art has forever been a bauble in the hands of the high and mighty.
And yet there you are, an artist through and through, by birth, training, and inclination.
Noah Fischer has high-grade art credentials: a graduate of America’s finest art programs, he had some very promising early solo shows in Chelsea and at art venues around the world. But from the start he’s been critical, has had a nagging discomfort with the whole proposition of making and showing art. What is art for, and why is it so important, so precious and expensive, in a world where average people can’t afford basic life needs, even though they work hard at rough jobs, while artists and their patrons jet around the world to art fairs where they buy and sell amazing and outrageous stuff, and talk about it over ruinously (though not to them) expensive dinners?
A decade or more ago, Noah Fischer began doing performance art, wearing large homemade President masks while giving outrageous speeches on soap boxes on Wall Street, which culminated in the tossing of buckets of coins into the air, which, amazingly, the brokers and executives on the street dove for. The day after the last of these performances, Occupy Wall Street began, about a block from where Noah had been speaking. He got off the box and joined the crowds at Zuccotti Park. His activism became his art, the beautiful expensive image his nemesis.
These images reflect Noah’s passionate commitment to a better world for ordinary people, and his critique of art as the province of the rich. As his father, I am amazed at and proud of his resourcefulness, his energy, his commitment to what he does, and his prophetic insistence that art be in service of a different, more just world, rather than the beneficiary of the corrupt world of the present. The raw power of these images, which absolutely refuse polite aesthetic veneer, and are courageously, even grotesquely, direct, reminds me of the aspiration I have for my poetry. Not to soar above the world in the heights of the ethereal art-cloud, but to join it with passion, on the ground, and in the midst of things.
—Norman Fischer
POEM (building up to the word never)
A phrase came to me
To release my brain of all its tension
Memory lapsed and before I knew it
I’d forgotten the phrase
Which was to have furnished
The contents of this line
Was forced to substitute another
Was forced to substitute another
This one
This one
The best I could do
Which happens to me more than I would like
More than I would like
But he is getting used to it
Just those words
The same ones used before
Well there are so many words there’s bound to be one
That will work out
Even if not the one he wanted
How much does it matter?
A word is a word
I’m repeating myself mimicking another
Person formerly me
I recover and remember to be myself
So. Am. Me.
Forgot. To be. You.
So am you
You and me we’re
Like two mountains. One
Here
One
Over there, run down this one
Run up that one and that one to you
Becomes this one, this one that
And so on and so forth
And so forth and so on
Constant shifting places and persons and things
All movement traces pattern,
I am pronouncing,
All pattern bulks as shape
I am definitively asserting,
All shape relaxes
Into heaps,
As we all know,
Hence memory fails to convince.
The past is now.
I don’t know who I am
And am even more suspicious of you
—-
I also am a terrorist a murderer
A racist misogynist misanthropic scoundrel
Once you dare traduce convention
Once you recognize
The utter impossibility of time and place
Everything is possible. In terrorists murderers racists misogynists
I see myself, that is, every and any one
Why not also me?
Why not me. Why not you?
My tendency to arrogantly misapprehend
And think I know what is what
Who I or you or they are
What makes them tick.
Universal love would be more like it.
But what possible meaning in that sentence
Could the word universal have?
None!
I also am a terrorist misogynist murderer if I think it possible
To die for a cause greater than myself
But what is the cause of death?
Life!
And what cause would I die for
That is greater than myself
If myself is already a lost cause
A cause of discomfort
Like a pinching shoe
Or a narrow country whose eastern and western
Borders overlap
When the sun sets
At the end of the day, who but me and you
Is responsible for that?
No eyes no light
No light no sun
No day no night
And vice versa
—-
I want to be a poet of the everyday, like W.H. Auden
A poet of the macabre, like Alice Notley
A poet of the sublime, like Frank O’Hara
I want to be the kind of poet really intelligent people
People who are sensitive and subtle and read a lot of poetry
Admire
This is my idea
What strategy shall I employ to bring this about?
First, I have to stop
Writing poems like this
Second, I need different feelings
Different experiences
And a better dictionary
A thesaurus too
Third, a different set of friends
Preferably people I meet at poetry conferences
And workshops
Poetry workshops and master classes
Taught by master poets
Who need to earn a living after all
And master classes and personal appearances
Make good sense
They pay — I too
Have my own personal appearances
To keep track of but then again
Everyone does
In our culturally democratic time
Anyone can be and usually is a poet
Therefore I shall be and am a poet too
I too am a poet
As I here declare
In perfectly sound poetic lines
You can tell
Because they do not extend all the way out to the right margin of the page but end here short of it
—-
My poetic insights into the nature of things
Are absolutely unique — no one
Sees things the way I do on the
Other hand it’s possible my
Unique insights are of no interest
To others
And do not fit into
The cultural conversation people are having
These days
Based on reactions to, or continuations of,
Cultural conversations of the past
In some cultures
Some of us are living in
In the present.
If so what am I to do?
How see things
Other than the way
The unique way
I see them, how improve
My conversational abilities
When I spend so much time in silence
Talk to no one but myself
(Though everyone answers)?
What do the eucalyptus or pine trees
Or the California quail think of the cultural conversation
Of the moment
Or of my unique insights of a lifetime
And what do I think of them
(I mean the quail and the insights)
(Are they really all that great when you come down to it?)
(Well the quail maybe….)
We all must have
Of necessity, like walking around money,
Some cock-eyed point of view
Or another
I guess
I’ll keep working on this question, trust me.
Check with me tomorrow
When I’m sure to have a better idea
—-
Another little poem in a plain style
Nothing fancy — just a little some-
Thing to remember me by
As I pass through this funny little
Lifetime talking to you
As I roll by cheerfully
In my usual tone
Of voice a poem
About (as usual)
Nothing
Just like all the other little poems out there.
Hi there. You are probably
A person just
As I am
Also a
Person being a person
Is truly
Some
Thing
Isn’t it?
So we must be
Persons together
And poems must
Echo that, must
Be all about
That
But
Poems can’t just be about
Words
Like this, don’t they
Express imagery and so on
Paint portraits and scenes
Refer to sensual experiences and
Emotions and epiphanies and
So
On
And so
Forth
And so
Forth
And so on
Not just
This, these
Anodyne words.
Well I’m sorry but
This is what I’ve got
Today, words in my mouth
This is my poem today
If you are reading this
It’s all you’ve got too
For now. If you are not reading
This well perhaps some day
You will read it and if not then well
Perhaps never.
Never is a long word.
January 6th! 2021, Pen and ink on paper, digital color © Noah Fischer
Taxi Drivers Alliance on Strike, 2019, Ink and watercolor on paper © Noah Fischer
2008, 2008, smashed pennies on scanner © Noah Fischer
Occupy City Hall Leadership, 2020, Watercolor on paper © Noah Fischer
Illustration for Demos, 2020, ink and watercolor on paper © Noah Fischer
Illustration for Demos, 2020, ink and watercolor on paper © Noah Fischer
POEM (Trumpisma)
Trump is now an older poet who refers to Homer
He’s got the virus but leaves hospital early
He’s lunatic but everyone takes him serious
Because he’s an older poet in a powerful position
He seems to be both, both
A powerful older poet referring to Homer
And a lunatic who leaves hospital early
No one takes him seriously
He’s in Michigan he’s in charge of the FBI
The FBI surveils him the Deep State the economy
But he’s unconcerned he’s got a trusting heart
Meantime in Michigan the Homeric warriors
Overcome by force
If not for the restrictions
The pleas to be careful, considerate, not to
Kidnap or kill public officials
The quixotic anarchistic chauvinistic supremacist
Warriors mention Homer, Achilles, Hector,
Mention Poseidon and Hermes
And Apollo mention
Ida and Olympus
Thank you for not thanking us they say
For saving your country
Meantime the Trumpian characters
Are not at all who they appear to be beneath
Their Trumpful exteriors be far other deep personae
As if like gods appearing in guise of other known persons
It’s distinctly another woman though
Understood to be a Trumpistic avatar
Who has many solipsistic avatars he plays
One against another the man doesn’t appear except as woman
He’s not me but it’s not a question of crossdressing
It’s remarkable how well the clothes fit the lipstick eyeshadow
He looks ravishing but it’s only an expression
Of his wanting to be glamorous, desired
He wants the connection he knows it’s not a good idea
He decides to take them off, hide the fact
But he doesn’t know about facts can’t find them can’t hide them
They ooze out from surrounding spaces like mud, like sputum, can’t be stopped
He’s wanting to make a connection so he can have more new children, fresh ones
But she can’t do that for him he thinks maybe he can do this himself in his own way
He should think of her but he can’t form notion of another in brain, brain’s broke
All this a vivid Trumpistic Trumpaloosa as its shimmer
Dims and fades as sunset pulls down
Sky over ocean — in Switzerland
The final Trumpanesque shard shatters
Over an Alp in this brief legal offshore life
With crypto-Trump’s begrudging blessing
Faithful yet never resting never satisfied
It was as if such animal contact were too much for it
Such fulfilled and unfulfilled touching he/she can never touch it’s too creepy
(At least apparently embedded as cryocluster within the psychic walls)…
Later in a Trumpsukian arcade or dell
‘Stop the Steal’ buskers bang on cans and flick tarps
In imitation of fierce wind or sea storms or the river in the Iliad
They’ve got their own photos of this with their own descriptions
In their universe sheep are lions and goats fish
In large tanks, colorful, on big credenzas in corporate offices
In tall buildings in large glitzy cities
From which you look down on tiny violent protest in the streets below
Then 9 and a half minutes of knee pressing neck
Precarity of breath it’s hevel a mere breath a fragile delicate air puff
Who can see it it doesn’t appear in the picture mystery or majesty of
One guy’s life Black guy’s white guys rushing into room look past
After all the hidden history no one talks about but its victims
With boot on neck which bulbous Trumpista weeps over at first
In innocent child-like empathy but can’t sustain thought
And thinking further remembers Trumpanistic self, air-stabs finger shouting
In Europe in Australia in Korea in China shouting all over the place
Right in face of the manufactured simulated bimbos and dog-faced women
Who handle him when he thinks he handles them they’re fleecing him of thin soul
I can’t breath I can’t breathe he says
Hands held high she says this lying in bed
In middle of night says it they fire anyway
A gun’s a toy for a serious boy
Bang bang you’re dead no need
To breathe or eat think sigh cry
And swiftly charged with murder
But people on the street and various gods ghosts push pull this
And that way it’s like a bloated word blows
Itself all over skymap blarp
He then has cops clear the area they baton-push hurl teargas
Against peaceful street protests pushed aside
As he in a Trumporama of Trumomania waves bible around in front of church
He doesn’t even know what he’s doing!
He’s got a look for camera like a damp broom or a cleaned clock
It’s doom all over it’s pushing back on down
It’s hell all over waving bible damnation end of days just like it says
To reassure folks that the hair the look the suit, Trumpisma’s
In the house not to worry
Country’s safe from broken glass broken chairs lefty socialistas
From firestorm from fearful chaos and from Bishop who says
I never invited this guy I never heard he was coming
What’s he doing here in this exploding dream?
just the
merest breath
breath
breath
all’s breath
merest
breath
Death Drive Token, 2013, wood, wax, gold leaf © Noah Fischer
Drone Border, 2054, watercolor on paper © Noah Fischer
Ivanka Gate, ink and watercolor on paper © Noah Fischer
THE MIGHTY PEN
Maybe now finally ink begins to flow into the nib of this Platignum calligraphy fountain pen I have not used probably since 1985. Yes maybe now finally. Maybe now. Maybe finally. Maybe now finally, maybe now finally this Platignum pen will write, maybe now I can be fluid and fully expressive with this Platignum calligraphy pen, I can think smoothly, words will come smoothly, elegantly, I can make good sense, contribute something to the general good and well being of the word and world and of people thinking along as they have been thinking along with and without me all this time, made in England, an obscure brown color, maybe tinted with purple slightly, maybe a dull yellow, but brownish, the pen mostly used by one P. Whalen for his tinkering and doodling in journals and probably purchased under his influence and guidance if not given to me by him in days long gone by when I aspired to calligraphy when I had patience for such things and hope for the development of skills I did not possess.
Today is May 12, 2014. The Platinum pen has been waiting patiently for this moment for nearly twenty years, perhaps more than twenty years. It has not been waiting. My saying that is a quaint projection of human hegemony over the world, as if pens were waiting for me to define them, as though they don’t have own pen world independent of me (as evidenced by the very word, that has “pen” in it, it is theirs, not mine). Waiting involves expectation, pens do not expect they exist. “Ex” in both words, meaning former or out of. To expect to exist you are formerly and out of — and pens are formerly and out of — as they are they are here today and gone tomorrow, always. Patiently. I am sitting in my cozy study here in Muir Beach, my hermitage on the breezy California coast where I write regularly breezy words. From here I cannot see the ocean though from other places where generally I sit to read or write or look or think or stare blankly I can see ocean, which is cold, generally grey, sometimes steel blue, always moving, stretching from here across to Asia, surrounding Hawaiian Islands and other islands along the way, who knows what is in it what under its surface as it moves sloshing this way and that way it never stops if I listen I can hear it. It is another day — not the day it was or the day it will be. It is a day sloshing this way and that way in oceans of time who knows what is under its surface this ocean of time what its depth covers this day pitches up suddenly temporarily a wave subsiding soon back into the general drift. Yes now I am now on laptop typing this that I have written with pen in notebook on that day on another day that came later than previous days which had numbers, called dates, but not a small brown sweet fruit you can eat, an abstraction, an idea, something to hold onto, to make sequences, to organize disappearance, as notion of ordinary time passing, February 12, 2021. And your reading of this whatever the reason whatever the profit (writing making it possible for present moments to be preserved so as to become present moments at future times not existing at the time of writing in present moment with pen then later transcribed on laptop with typing action of fingers moving rapidly) this will certainly be another day still later than that day in ordinary sequence of time. It will be your moment, reader, notice it now. The day you are reading this is here but all the other days mentioned are gone. Submerged into the ocean of times circulating and recirculating across the planet across space amid the stars, as stars, who knows where the stars travel if they travel where would they go? Now there’s only one day, as there has always only been one day, today. This particular day, that is in fact several days at once, of writing with pen, of typing with laptop, of readings, perhaps several at different times and places, different minds, at least a few, but there is only one reading and only one writing, at each time subsuming all the others of course as it must.
It has not worked out well. Ink is only fitfully and partially flowing from this Platignum pen, which makes the writing and the thinking slow. Very slow. S L O W. Have to patiently get that word onto paper. Yet I could write, slowly, Q U I C K and that would be deceptive. Writing is deceptive. This pen makes it so. Speaking, thinking, where there is a voice a mind a face is less so? Writing is an abstraction abstractions like time, like ocean, are deceptive. I can write one thing and mean something else. Can think of slow as quick, quick as slow. You cannot see my face to know what I mean. My face tells what I mean. But when I look in mirror I see it backwards. A reflection is an abstraction, a concrete abstraction. What do I ever see? A written word hides a face. Slow thinking is different from rapid thinking just as slow writing is different from rapid writing. More patient. Word by word, even letter by letter. Less to say (think) less to be said or thought. So there are different thoughts, different sorts of thoughts. In old age it is preferable to think more slowly and to use fewer and simpler words.
Yet the poor ink flow from this pen, which is getting worse, not better, with use, makes thinking, which is writing, in the mind, or with a pen, tortuous, painful. It is hard to get a thought out. To get it down. To write it down. To put a thought down. One should apologize to the thought. The mind is breaking down slowly as I write this.
Breaking.
Down.
Slow - ly.
Approaching the condition of silence. How would one write silence, a blank?
B
L
A
N
K?
I think I’d better stop now and get another — a different — pen, one that can be counted on to work better. Can this be done? How reliable is anything I could ever hope to find to hand. Does the pen the text the word the thought the mind blow away with the wind of time? Who said writing is permanent? Maybe it used to be but is no longer? What happened to the canon, the timeless canon? We fight over it, over who can be said to stand tall in time’s winds it doesn’t blow us over? It does. Eternity which used to be long and therefore somehow comforting turns out to be very brief and therefore anxious. Perhaps not. It depends perhaps on your point of view. Brief might be eternal after all, it might be quite long in its very brevity, coming closer to silence the nearer it gets. All the letters scatter in such brilliant wind. How glorious those scattered letters. Glittering. With this poor pen the only thing I can write about is the pen itself how it feels in the hand what it looks like, the flow of ink it proposes, how it performs its task, to write words. This is the only fit subject. The only subject, in fact. No, not the pen as an object but the pen as an action, as an extension of the action of my thinking mind, which is the thinking mind of a typical person held upright in a blistering and sharply etched unique historical moment. A jagged tattered moment. With edges. I can’t get involved in any other content from the past or future whatever I know of my own past or future or the past and future of any of us all of us is a projection of this pen this present this hope to be thinking and marking the time in which this pen notes its letter. L E T T E R. The poorness of my instrument forces me time and time again into the present. I have forgotten all else of course I have. Even when I remember the past becomes the present. The P R E S E N T. Because of the infirmity of my pen the present is the only moment in which and about which I can be expected to write, the only subject that in fact can be discussed when using this malfunctioning pen.
Perhaps if I keep on writing, eventually things will improve. Ink flow into the pen is bound to increase. Other times will emerge from now.
New pen. Ink flow into this pen is worse. This is a so-called designer pen with a fancy checkered cap, a rollerball. Manufactured for Perry Ellis, not the person but the name Perry Ellis, a legal entity not for making things but for branding them, adding value by naming them, though pen has been manufactured in a foreign country, China. I have never liked rollerball pens. They run out of ink so quickly. The ink in this pen is very faint when it appears on the page. I have the feeling that it will run dry at any moment. Back to the Platinum calligraphy fountain pen. No better than it was before. My patience wears thin. Why am I keeping this up? What is the point of this endless going on writing? What am I writing about? What is so important that it must be consigned to words preserved here? People do it so many people do it they are talking to themselves to one another they are advancing the art of poetry or history or prose or memoir or the novel or short story or some other such formal pattern of words crawling across page, black letters on white paper, crawling like insects, insidious insects, or screens lit with words, as if words and letters were scintillating little characters who are handsome and plain and have small and large stories to tell, on the screen, where they dance as they are written, appearing out of nowhere, but now who hopes to advance anything, what is there any longer to be advanced, aren’t we just talking, yammering, to what ends who do we think we are talking to and what do we think they are gaining or losing from our talking our yammering our writing with pen? Perhaps if I press down more firmly on the nib….
Now I am using a Xeno 1.0 ball-point pen from Staples; black ink. It works. But I do not like ballpoint pens, I cannot write with them. I do not know why it seems to me the words are false the words too crude too instrumental, too practical, issuing commands or instructions, so don’t really make sense or add up to anything of actual value, I cannot feel them elegantly, they do not flow, they require too much pressure, when I am writing with a ballpoint pen. OK I can use this pen for addressing a letter or taking a grocery note, this or that item to buy at store the next time I go so I will remember, writing is good for that, to remember, or for accounting, but not when I am writing like this, what do I mean “like this” and what do the little strokes that make quotation marks around the words do to them? Do they mind, the words? Do they feel sheltered by those little marks I have made to enclose them? This is a Zebra 2 grip, medium point. But yes, a ballpoint. That’s really too bad. I am much inhibited by it. This is a Sensa — black ink, like the others, and functional. But also a ballpoint. I simply can’t think with a ballpoint pen, I am sorry. I keep getting distracted by the fact that the pen is a ballpoint pen, not a fountain pen. I can’t not notice this stubborn fact. Every word is colored by this fact in my mind, in my hand. The world while apparently the same is in truth a different one now when enclosed within words written by this ballpoint pen.
But the grip on the Sensa is pleasant, like jelly but without the mess. This is a Sharpie. No jelly grip, hard plastic. Better. Not a ball-point. Ultra-fine point, permanent marker. These words, which flow now more quickly, will never wash away. They will last forever, permanently. Good dark honest ink. But because of this the words bleed onto the reverse side of the notebook page, so there are words and ghosts of words behind them. What to do about this.
A new Sheaffer “Prelude” from Peyton Street Pens, broad nib. Nice pen, very nice, a handsome pen, hefty in the hand, in its very nice ox-blood leather box, I take it out, I write, old/new, meaning it’s a 1970’s pen made then and never used, box unopened. Carefully I open the box, inside it what seems to be white satin on which pen sits, handsomely. I take it out of box with reverence. A pen. They were running out of fine nibs so I ordered “broad” but I don’t like broad nib well maybe I’ll get used to it. New bottle of Parker Quink just arrived from China via Amazon — left on doorstep 9 PM last night, in January, January 22, 2021. During a rain storm. We are as mighty kings, we summon what we desire from the ends of the earth and our underpaid minions deliver it to our door.
Ordered pen because of the many emails back and forth with Terri, owner of Peyton Street Pens, (this is now the “Craftsman,” fine point, ordered from her in 2015. It needs fixing something wrong with filling mechanism — what the emails were about. She was so nice about it all I felt compelled to order another pen, the “Prelude,” as described above, when I was writing with it, having first taken it from the box, its satin bed, to write with it for the first time. Maybe Terri can fix the Craftsman. This is the Craftsman, it is now some weeks later, she fixed it perfectly, turns out I did not know how to work it, you pull the plunger out and slowly press it in with nib in ink bottle, pen fills nicely, a mechanism I had never seen before and must be rare, but pen writes nicely smoothly and letters are formed more crisply than with Prelude, too broad I am not getting used to it).
This pen I am now writing with at a later time Hannah gave me from Alan’s collection before she sold the collection some time after his death. What I thought was “broad” nib when I ordered broad nib expecting this but it was not this that arrived not this that the pen manifested this is a calligraphy nib, like the Platinum, it is not a broad nib. It’s a very old, 1930’s, distinguished pen, black or gray, marbled with white streaks, squared at the ends, skips, barely writes, or anyway writes for only a few words, less than a paragraph of words, also filling mechanism seems not to work. Plunger flaps, it must be broken, unhooked from whatever inside causes it to fill. It barely fills. Pleasing to write with. You must write slowly then go back and fix the skips. Words become a laborious technical matter of individual letters and parts of letters with parts of letters missing, to be repaired. Not moving at speed of thought, moving rather at speed of hand and dysfunctional pen, the limitations are physical, not mental. Are my words expressive of my personality, my character, my erudition, my passion, my history, or just of the pen and now (it is later) the keyboard upon which I am inevitably typing. Silently except for the characteristic clatter of the keys, not at all the same as typewriter keys on which I typed for many years, their metallic clicking, tapping, this is a plastic a soft clattering, when cut and paste actually meant cut and paste and redrafts were hard to come by they were redrafted retyped again and again after first having been handwritten. How did Henry James do it? Or Homer? Amanuenses. Workshops full of producers of words.
Peyton Street Pens for some reason specializes in SheafferShaeffer pens — I’ve never had them before. Have several Parkers, Watermans (lost a few), Cross, Lamy, Pelican, unnamed brands or brands whose names I do not know, cheap pens, I do not have a collector’s budget, or maybe I am quite wealthy but I don’t know it, or believe it, and is wealth after all mostly a matter of belief, shared belief, but no Sheaaeffer till I ordered in 2015, the aforementioned Craftsman, which I seldom used because I did not understand the filling mechanism, Terry did not so much fix it as explain to me how to work it, so that now I use it more, in fact am using it now as I write these words, did I mention that it is maroon, yes maroon, very handsome, with tapered lines, tapered at the tip and cap, with a gold clip, small, light, most of my pens are black, black is a very popular and obvious color for a fountain pen, but the cap doesn’t fit quite right, it falls off, I have to keep reaffirming it as I write, just as I have to keep reaffirming myself, reminding myself that well yes I am a person and so of course I am writing I have things to say even if nothing much really and people must say these things yammering on and on into the night until it finally falls on us — and now (writing this with Prelude still can’t get used to broad nib makes me think more crudely, as if my thoughts elide and are thicker) but it’s a handsome pen, marbled deep green, gold trim, I am not sure what material it is made of, what are pens made of, some kind of fancy plastic? Good ink flow but as I have already said and will say again I don’t like broad nib maybe I’ll get used to it.
Jefferson mold, 2013, plaster © Noah Fischer
Double Lincoln mold, 2013, plaster © Noah Fischer
Three Panels from The Pit, 2021, ink and watercolor on paper © Noah Fischer
Make Art Great Again, 2018, ink and watercolor on paper © Noah Fischer
A Future Museum, 2018, ink and watercolor on paper © Noah Fischer
Museum Trustees, 2018, ink and watercolor on paper © Noah Fischer
POEM (simple bodies)
Don’t know why these photos print black & white
The page the page the black & white page the blank & whir
The image the page the image black & white
Shows grainy distant described disturbed world
In eye of beholder such beauty when throw wide the arms
Other side of hand other side of mouth other side of side
Where the dead are dead & the living alive
But not always necessarily the case that this or that is so
The dead walk among us little slips and shards and snatches of them
Looking over shoulder listening to what you say you read
& then the music swamps it — what holds you in it
Some song sung together then even when we do not hear it
The raven then come clicking beak come cawing back shifting spot
On skypole perched covering function & fiction
Don’t meander there (I mean in a past I don’t ever enter in a present that can’t even
Ever be past or present or here so stuckly)
but
These sharps concerns of self these sacred evenings
Passed in long shadows & easy suppers
It’s raining again I was shut in again I was
Much as ever in fullest sunlight height of day
Such dreams as were proffered such carnivals
As frenzied people popped, pretending to attend their lives they were not there
Such exaltation in battle when the gods sent through them their to-&-fro emotion
Them winning & losing battles that way
Beyond their framed descriptions of simple bodies their songs
—
Bustling up the Avenue of Dark Considerations teetering in her high heels the gracious self
(Self is always female) mountains shake below her & below them & us
Sea where they keep it always down there below so as to fall into so much sea everywhere!
Who figured on this small blue planet shining like a marble in space
Whose eyes see what I see see the shape the shimmer out there
Where implications wander all over the place as if solid objects
The guy cleaning his gun every Sunday ‘cause that’s what he likes to do his daddy did
Little pet world little pet self goes poof he shoots world dead he can do this
Lots of torn threads sharp tongues open throats needing to be fed
To purify an habituated set of pursed lips
so
List the foods you want to order in order of their desirability
Shuffle them by chance operations & unconscious paranoid duplicities
All untying of knots relative in a sweeping extension of nugatory principles of distinction
No one lacks motivation to live it seems even under horribly suboptimal conditions
To love to shout to murmur & complain in maximum resentment
It makes you angry to think about it
Downtown Revolution, 2017, acrylic on paper © Noah Fischer
Deep in Debt, 2017, pen and ink on paper © Noah Fischer
POEM (marching orders)
No use trying to hide the plain-sight secret
Whose secret? Not mine, yours
The peripheral knows the peripheral speaks the peripheral
Slides out from the clammy cupboard so scummy in there so fly-blown
Then get born and pick up marching orders it’s all
Demarcated in advance so much time for so many
Steps each one deft according to the chart
Whether you take it
Or stumble back
Words remain bombastic and ironic the whole time you mouth them
As you stew in life’s duplicitous everydayness
Of obdurate stuff and uncooked emotion
Gray outside today as usual on windy California coast
One among the conceivable locations some daytime light
Moon and stars at nightI’m walking down 20th Street with a friend
Board Meeting, 2017, watercolor on paper © Noah Fischer
POEM (rowdy)
Where words come from
I march the streets rowdy
Bracing for a fight
Too many false words
Telling too many busted tales
Of wrong turns and crooked deeds
Official lies in legal tongue
Tied up in knots in mouth
Dear honorable sir or madam
I appeal to you on basis of your assumed humanity
To cease and desist from your unfortunate serial delirious actions
This is an exercise in rhetoric
I must complete within a few lines
Because there are so many other things one must tend to
More significant than poetry
Which is as insignificant as it is significant
Inarticulate as it articulates
And is therefore one option among the many
Incoherencies
Desist I say at once! (For that’s the only way to say and do it)
From contumacious falsehood
From spurious claims of righteousness
That merely mask a fearful will to power
The terror of the dark that children feel
Who have been insufficiently or ineptly loved
What its called justice
Is a fanciful conceptual decoration
Adorning the human feeling of caring, loving
Swaddling all thought and word
According to the texts
I have been lately perusing
Dear friends,
Take to the streets if you must
But remove your weapons
Masked you must be, muzzled not
You must bray with ox’s mouth
Bray like a donkey roar like a lion
Eagle, symbol of the Republic
Noble wide-winged sudden swooping bird
A scavenger as we now know
Danger Dancers Street Action, 2017, wax and paper maquette © Noah Fischer
Merit Money, 2013, paint and wax on cloth © Noah Fischer
POEM (weather)
Funny weather
(to one) when warm it’ll always be
cold it’s always never been anything other than
It had been sunny and warm(sitting on couch reading that it was
Sunny, warm, mild, that it was) raining, storming, shaking trees, reading
of snowy city streets footprint impressions
Of troubles, pressures, that they are
Words weather (even today with a catch in one’s breath)
POEM (trying to be clear)
Credit Card Study, 2013, plastic, metal, wood, string © Noah Fischer
Meeting is such sweet sorrow Sam
Borrowing a little curtain for unseeing eyes
In play atop the precincts
Making memory world
You want to communicate not adjudicate
But must find its proper style
Nor lay down track for train wreck
Magnify their proportions into voice
That looms smokey across dire convictions
As if words strung out across the page
Or festooned as cartoon balloons around rooms
Meant emotion (popping sound)
Bodies meanwhile pile up
In stinking identity flesh-towers
Their thoughts in sawdust on barroom floors
Life’s life’s shell, a whorl of passion
Better maybe return to silence
Than yell at the others so they’ll yell back
But who can suppress the glottal urges
Rising mercenary in mercury and muck
“The man in the standard shirt”
The man in the standard shirt
Deployed like a weapon
Seized tiny world in fist &
Warped by imagination
All the acceptable truths —
Why can’t I or anyone simply decide
As he did in the beginning
What words will stand for
Towers of channeling
In own mind —
To say emotion is already to be distant from it
To say it is eternal return
It’s a conversation
So that knowledge proceeds not by fact
But by contact
Proving what’s wrong with things
Afterward, an original idea or feeling
Skin on skin
No more than that
Just as ascertainable —
This poem
Says exactly what it means
Anyone can understand
Golder Gipper, 2012, photograph, wax, gold leaf © Noah Fischer
POEM (Homer says)
Homer says you must duke it out for honor and the gods
Who make you do it
And Plato says the goods are out there you just have to turn around to find them
In your mind
Augustine says be still and know that I am God
Dark in your interiority in your unnameable castle of self
Squiggles of black on white at the end of a technological age
When humans fall off the cliff of human, world’s a whirl
A gauzy blurry painting worth a fortune in gold
The triumph of the image in smoke and mirrors and dollars
I don’t hear your voices anymore
Where are you now that I need you?
The inner and outer tangle the collective sing-song rhyme
Let’s believe history has a purpose the Chinese poets knew
Let’s prettify it drink plum wine and view the peonies
View landscapes clouds roads and trails a little temple at the top
And drum the doctrine in
That you are new
You say you are
Beyond which you pass at your peril
I’m thinking of a lake
Very peaceful in my brain
The only lakes that ever are
Are there as I describe them
An habituation for waterfowl
And innocent hidden fishes
There’s a point of light in the far distance
I go there
But the light’s moved to another spot
Just where the palm of my hand meets the cold flagpole
Such symbols of my hunger
Appease your anatomy if you must
Tree branches criss-cross outside my window
A spot of feeling in the field of vision
You could weep at other latitudes
In Iceland and Greenland people don’t say that kind of thing
There the government doesn’t pretend to be perfect
And truth doesn’t masquerade as lies
All this shouting
Too many snakes roosters and pigs crowded into a pen
Baby birds know which side of the barn is safest
What’s that whine beyond my window?
I mean wind beyond my mirror outside my weeping
I can’t get a handle on it can’t
Get my arms around it
My feet my legs entangled
There’s a ship out there beyond the waters
Slowly moving on
The latter day people descend to the limit
Having to part the bullrushes to see a story
Then to violate its plot once more
Which is all they ever do
Just as their ancestors
I can’t gather rosebuds
Sickened by the coronation I look leeward or yonder
Or nearly into some distance
Pursued by the Jews pursuing the Egyptians who pursue them
In a roundabout configuration
Of bent trees and their limbs and twigs
I don’t see anything
Outside the generality of particulars
It’s all a bell curve
My abstract words deface
I do violence to myself and the new world order
Even nature has its doubts about me
No joke for the weary
I’m overfull of the burning trees
They shake and roll on the sharp hill
Gashes of light pierce the pusillanimous
In rapture and small-minded attainment
In the grand scheme of things who measures up?
Self-satisfaction’s an oxymoron a toxic canard
A canal a cabal a scribbled poem
Do I mean what I say?
Do I say what I mean?
Do I mean or say meaningful sayings of meaning?
Do I meaningfully pursue my sayings or long for sayable meanings?
Do I lapse and lean and lend my ears?
The brain explains what I know to me
Trust the wisdom of the brain
Encased in the wooden skull a species of crate
In the deranged sense of being in the world
Forget the former words in books
Or the present words
For that matter
Or this matter
Who outside the brain would listen
Or what are we after if not to be washed
With hyssop clean between meals
FB Feed Study, watercolor on paper © Noah Fischer
Untitled (No War in Iraq), 2004, Photograph from hand cut negative © Noah Fischer
Untitled (No War in Iraq), 2004, Photograph from hand cut negative © Noah Fischer
Their Thrones, 2020, ink on paper, digital color © Noah Fischer
