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Jammed TransmissionPoeta En San Francisco

Excerpt from
J A M M E D _ T R A N S M I S S I O N
by Paul Naylor • 2009 • $16
Designed by Sumet (Ben) Viwatmanitsakul

Micchaka

Clear sky
wide against
the horizon.

Time still
to go on –
each instant

the sorcery
of its own
becoming.

Why this
insistent
resistance?

Jammed Transmission is Paul Naylor’s third full-length book of poetry, following Playing Well With Others (2004) and Arranging Nature (2006). He is also the author of Poetic Investigations: Singing the Holes in History (1999), a study of five contemporary poets, including Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Lyn Hejinian and Kamau Brathwaite. A recovering academic, Naylor lives in San Diego, where he directs Singing Horse Press.

With this volume, Tinfish Press moves from its usual concentration on the Pacific as a cultural and historical space to that of a spiritual trans-historical one. In his preface to the book, Zen priest Norman Fischer writes: “Jammed Transmission is a poetic encounter with a 14th century text of Japanese Soto Zen, Keizan Jokin’s Denkoroku (usually translated as Record of the Transmission of the Light), a spiritual genealogy of the Soto lineage, beginning with the Buddha and ending with Koun Ejo, Keizan’s immediate predecessor in the lineage, fifty-two generations later.”