|
Poet
NORMAN FISCHER
reads from his new book
CONFLICT
Thursday, February 2, 7pm
Norman Fischer is a poet and Zen Buddhist priest. For many years he has taught
at the San Francisco Zen Center,
the oldest and largest of the new Buddhist organizations in the West, where he served as Co-abbot from 1995-2000. He is presently
a Senior Dharma Teacher there as well as the founder and spiritual director of the Everyday Zen Foundation, an organization
dedicated to adapting Zen Buddhist teachings to Western culture. Among his many books are Taking Our Places: the Buddhist
Path to Truly Growing Up; Sailing Home: Using Homer’s Odyssey to Navigate Life’s Perils and Pitfalls; Opening
to You: Zen-inspired Translations of the Psalms and numerous books of poetry, including Precisely the Point being Made;
Slowly but Dearly and I Was Blown Back. He is also the author of Jerusalem Moonlight, a prose memoir about Judaism
and Buddhism. Norman Fischer has been particularly interested in the application of Zen to issues of Western culture and everyday
life in the world. His Zen essays on topics ranging from racism to monasticism to romance appear frequently in Tricycle,
Shambhala Sun and Buddhist Writing. In addition to his regular work at Zen Center and with Everyday Zen, he has taught
extensively with his old friend, the late Rabbi Alan Lew, on the relationship between Buddhist and Jewish practice. He is
the co-founder, with Rabbi Lew, of Makor Or Jewish Meditation Center in San Francisco.
Conflict, Norman Fisher’s recently published book-length poem, is an exploration of conflict within the
self; conflict between friends, lovers, communities, nations, war and torture.
________________
Renowned Canadian author
GARY GEDDES
will discuss his new book
DRINK THE
BITTER ROOT:
A Search for Justice and Healing in Sub-Saharan Africa
Tuesday, February 14, 7pm
Drink the Bitter Root is an international story about the ethical and environmental footprint world nations are leaving in
Africa in their determined efforts to destabilize and loot the continent. In the spirit of Robert Kaplan and Samantha Power,
Gary Geddes sets out in search of justice, healing, and reconciliation. He begins his journey at the International Criminal
Court in The Hague, then travels to Rwanda, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, and Somaliland,
crossing Lake Victoria and the Great Rift Valley, where human life began.
Geddes' quest takes
the form of an intimate personal travelogue. Although he confronts the dark realities of abduction, rape, mutilation, and
murder, drawing on painful encounters, interviews, and adventures that occur along the way, Geddes also brings back amazing
stories of survival and unexpected moments of grace. His poet’s eye and self-deprecating humor draw us ever more deeply
into the lives of some amazing Africans, while never forgetting the complicity we all feel in the face of tragic events unfolding
there. In the words of author and Africanist Ian Smillie, Drink the Bitter Root is not only poignant, literate, and
funny, but also “a deeply textured journey without maps into the unexplored rifts of sub-Saharan Africa, the human experience,
and the psyche. It’s also the masterful handling of a full palette.”
Gary Geddes is an internationally
acclaimed travel writer who has been compared to Bruce Chatwin, Michael Ondaatje, and William Least Heat-Moon. He has written
and edited more than thirty-five books, which have sold close to half a million copies in seven languages. His memoir Sailing
Home and his travelogue Kingdom of Ten Thousand Things were both Canadian bestsellers.
____________________
Poets
Norman
Schaefer
reads from his collection
The Sunny Top of
California:
Sierra Nevada Poems and a Story
___and___
John Brandi
reads
from his book
Seeding The Cosmos:
New and Selected
Haiku
Friday, April
20 7pm
Norman
Schaefer has been a laborer and gardener, climber, and expert Sierra Nevada backpacker for over twenty years. But more
than that he is a unique poet. He sat in on one of my early poetry workshops when I was teaching at UC Davis in the early
90s, and after the first year I told him, “You’re good enough now to keep going on your own and leave other influences
behind.” He has stayed in touch with me though and kept me up on his long mountain trips and also his writing. We did
a poetry reading together one time in Davis where we each read West Coast mountain poems. I have seen his work become more
compressed, refined, and intense over time. Many of his poems show the influence of Chinese classical poetry and a bit of
Han-shan, the “Cold Mountain” poet. Even so they all have Schaefer’s own stamp. Part of his uniqueness is
the modesty and underlying humor woven through the poems. He is a mountain lover without showy piety or bravado. I know of
nobody else who catches the feel of the high country rocks, trails, and winds with the immediacy that Norman does. A story
of his life and his practice of walking in the Sierra weaves through the poems. Yet he is not a single-minded fanatic—just
a dedicated person (in the old style) of the Way. And as it works out, a fine poet as well. – GARY
SNYDER John Brandi, a native of Southern California, grew up traveling the Big Sur coast, the Sierra Nevada mountain
range and the Mojave Desert. Then he joined the Peace Corps, worked with Andean
farmers in their struggle for civil liberties and land rights, and began publishing his poetry in hand-sewn mimeograph editions
as part of the “do-it-yourself” phenomenon that preceded the alternative-press movement. Returning to North America, he met Beat Generation poets Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, and Allen Ginsberg
while living in California, and in 1971 moved to New Mexico. He still resides there, living in the northern mountains with
his wife, poet Renée Gregorio. During Brandi’s early years in the Southwest, he traveled with Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki,
and compiled That Back Road In, the first of his many memorable poetry collections.
He stayed alive by teaching as an itinerant poet and in 1979 received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry. San Francisco Poet Laureate Jack Hirschman has said of Brandi: “He has been
an open roader for much of his life and like his two great forebears, Whitman and Neruda, has named the minute particulars,
the details of his sojournings … infusing them with a whole gamut of feelings— compassionate, mischievous, loving
and righteous. New Mexico writer John Nichols, in his introduction to Brandi’s book of essays Reflections in the Lizard’s Eye, wrote: “The way Brandi interprets the world is rich with the guts
and gusto of old-fashioned magicians. His is a bittersweet, loving vision, as well as a hardass, heartfelt swansong to the disappearing vestiges of a more truthful
way of life.”
Previous Events at D.G.Wills Books
Christopher Hitchens
Director Oliver Stone
Historian and Churchill biographer Sir Martin Gilbert
Francoise Gilot
Vogue magazine photo of Francoise Gilot
at the original store
Michael McClure
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman, Director of the Neurosciences
Institute, with U.C. Berkeley philosopher John Searle with Mrs. Searle
Nobel Laureate Manfred Eigen
Quincy Troupe
Iris Chang
Gerry Spence
Noted editor Robert Weil, editing a Patricia
Highsmith manuscript for W.W. Norton & Co.
|
