Essays
From “Experience: Thinking, Writing, Language, and Religion”
“I seem to be convinced that the point of poetry is to clarify language through a process of ongoing exploration, so that I can more and more find out how to live within language as a joy and a liberation, rather than as a prison, which it can be and usually is when I am definingmyself and the world in language….”
“Though they say writing is a bad habit for a Zen priest, I can’t help it. I seem to be writing all the time.”
“Almost every day I listen to or read or watch the news, some days all three of these, because I want to stay tuned to what is seemingly going on in the world outside my house. These days this is an unpleasant experience. … But when I switch the news off and read a poem or listen to music I begin to thaw out. ”
“Whenever anyone asks me how I came to be a Zen priest and abbot I always say “accidentally.” This is true. While I admire religious people, people who seem to have a religious destiny and interest … I am afraid that I am just not such a person. Mainly I am and have been all my life bewildered.”
“The reason we need art so desperately is that the world and we ourselves persist in being made.”
Norman reviews Philip Whalen's Overtime: Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1999).
Uncollected Essays
Links to essays in Buddhadharma and Shambhala Sun at Lions Roar.
Norman reflects on the visual poetry of Philip Whalen, Robert Grenier, and Hank Lazer
Links to essays in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.
List of essays published in The Sun Magazine.
Uncollected Reviews by Norman
Norman review's Burt Kimmelman’s Gradually the World: New and Selected Poems, 1982–2013 (BlazeVOX [books] 2013)
Norman reviews A Mammal of Style by Ted Greenwald and Kit Robinson (Roof Books 2013)
Norman reviews Ijele by Uche Nduka (Overpass Books 2012).
Norman reviews Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions by Charles Bernstein.
Norman reviews Kazuaki Tanahashi's Treasury of the True Dharma Eye: Zen Master Dogen’s Shobo Genzo (Shambhala Publications, 2011).
Norman reviews The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen (Wesleyan University Press, 2007).
“Light is mysterious. Both a wave and a particle, and therefore neither, light is a universal constant; neither medium nor content, light is strangely all-pervasive. ”