Experience
“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….”
Read More“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. ”
Read More“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.”
Read More“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. ”
Read More“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.”
Read More“The reason we need art so desperately is that the world and we ourselves persist in being made.”
Read MoreNorman reviews Philip Whalen's Overtime: Selected Poems (Penguin Books, 1999).
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