November 6, 2024
7:00 PM - 8:30 PM
Join us to celebrate the launch of two new poetry books by BZC friends and acclaimed poets: Granny Cloud by Farnoosh Fathi and Through a Window by Zoketsu Norman Fischer. BZC Administrative Director Ryan Lee Wong will read from a new short story and the three will discuss Zen, poetics, and Eihei Dogen’s “grandmotherly” or “parental” mind.
Copies of both books will be available by donation for signing by the authors. Attendance is free, please register (below) by November 5.
The event will be live-streamed. Registrants will receive a link for viewing.
The Publisher’s Description of Granny Cloud:
The title of her book links to both the progressive cloud-based educational program in India and the “grandmaternal mind” in Zen Buddhism—a mind that is tender, equanimous, and free to be absorbed by everything one encounters. Iterations of lines tumble from poem to poem through repeated portraits of home and children, peas and baldness, worms, spiders, and snails that collect in a salivating grand cloud of lyric reinvention.
The Publisher’s Description of Through a Window:
Imagine Norman Fischer’s career built on sitting and looking inward. Suddenly, Covid, and the whole world is sitting and looking inward (what choice did we have), so Fischer, adventurer that he is, starts writing Through a Window about sitting and looking out a window. This new world of looking outward then encounters language outside the window “some [other branch] Eu / Cal / Ip / Tus.” This strange quest into poetry appears to someone carefully prepared yet shocked as if by the unexpected for this moment of vision.
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We ask that all participants be fully vaccinated and boosted. Masks are optional. Please see the BZC Covid Protocol for more information.
Boundless Mind Temple is located in the Parish House of Christ Church Cobble Hill, next to 326 Clinton Street. Enter the driveway on Clinton, go past the scaffolding, and through the double doors. There are two flights of stairs leading to the center, located on the second floor. The closest subway stop is the F/G at Bergen Street.
Farnoosh Fathi is the author of Great Guns (Canarium, 2013), the editor of Joan Murray: Drafts, Fragments, and Poems (NYRB, 2018), and the founder of the Young Artists Language and Devotion Alliance (YALDA). She lives and teaches in New York.
A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Norman Fischer has been publishing poetry since 1979. He holds an MFA from the University of Iowa Writer’s Workshop and a masters from the Graduate Theological Union at the University of California at Berkeley. Norman has been a Zen Buddhist priest for nearly 30 years, serving as abbot for the San Francisco Zen Center from 1995-2000. Founder and teacher of the Everyday Zen Foundation, he is one of the most highly respected Zen teachers in America, regularly leading Zen Buddhist retreats and events.
Ryan Lee Wong has been practicing with Brooklyn Zen Center since 2015 and currently serves as its Administrative Director. In 2019, he received Jukai from Kosen Greg Snyder. He lived for two years at Ancestral Heart Zen Temple, where he served as Shika, Work Leader, and Jisha to Kosen. He has served on the Ethics Committee, the Zen Students of Color Group, and co-facilitated Undoing Patriarchy. He is the author of the novel Which Side Are You On.