A collage composed of new translations of Dogen Zenji’s “Uji” and the poetry of the late poet, Leslie Scalapino.
San Diego, CA: Singing Horse Press (August 15, 2015)
“Norman Fisher has created, for the time being, the perfect introduction to Leslie Scalapino’s poetics. MAGNOLIAS ALL AT ONCE offers a set of commentaries on Dogen, the astounding medieval Japanese Zen writer, by the mind-bending contemporary American poet Leslie Scalapino. Or, to put it the other way around: in this set of uncannily paired texts, Scalapino provides a step-by-step guide to reading Dogen. Fischer has written new and provocative translations of Dogen that, against all logic, put the Zen master at the center of modernist and contemporary radical poetics. Magnolias concludes with Fischer’s illuminating, essential essay/interview on Scalapino’s work. In this work of collaboration and elegy, Fischer adeptly generates conceptual bumps and gaps, crackling flashes that make momentarily perceptible the disappearing vistas of time’s viscous inebriations.”