Tinker Greene and Norman Fischer: April 14, 2022

Norman Fischer reads from his Selected Poems 1980-2013 a section from the book Success, where each work is named according to a dating convention. The second selection is from Questions, Places, Voices, Seasons and is followed by excerpts from Conflict and The Strugglers. He then reads a fragment of the longer work, Recognition. Finally, he reads from his book On a Train at Night, a serial poem with an acrostic scheme, from the section that begins: "Vertiginous oracle...."

After an introduction from Alastair Johnston, Tinker Greene reads from his newly published collection, Blue Flame Ring: Collected Poems. In relation to the first few poems, including "A Morning," "At Bob's," "Bolinas Again," and "Thirteen Curves," he shares stories about staying in Bolinas, CA, on the Pacific coast north of San Francisco, and the writing that took shape there. With regard to "An Apocalypse," he mentions the University of San Francisco campus, known as Lone Mountain. Greene grew up in Vermont and talks about trying to write about memories of childhood, but finding them mixed in with fantasy, as in the poem that begins "My Vermont is a hayfield and a stuffy attic...." "Blue Flame Ring" is based on a backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. "The Pleasures of Sleep" and the poem that follows were written in Burlington, VT, after having moved back there from New York City; "Saint Jerome in the Wilderness" is part of a sequence of five poems that started out as descriptions of paintings at the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago.