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Gail Sher: Collected Poetry 1982-2007
A Review Essay
by Andrew Schelling
I first met Gail Sher in the early nineteen-eighties when we were both living in
Berkeley. I’d already read her earliest published poetry and heard friends speak
about her practice of both Buddhism and writing. In a modest way she was a
legend among local poets & Zen students. When I actually met her, she was
finishing up a book of bread recipes [From a Baker’s Kitchen, 1984/2004], an
activity less surprising in those days than it might seem now.
The story about Gail’s poetry was that she’d begun to write her tough, multilayered, flint-like poems, often in series, while a student at Zen Center’s
Tassajara Mountain retreat. She had continued to write as a daily discipline after
returning to the East Bay where she dwelt on the far fringes of the energetic
language poetry crowd. The earliest events she and I appeared at together were
conversations about poetry and Buddhist practice—once in San Francisco, once
at Green Gulch Zen Center near Muir Beach. To my imagination though, she
remained a figure of Tassajara.
Tassajara lies in one of those cañados that in summer visiting season crackles
with tough, aromatic brush—as well as manzanita & poison oak—deep in the
mountains inland from Monterey. The site, along a boulder strewn creek, was
first known to native peoples for its healing hot springs. You can only readily get
there during the dry season, & only with a serviceable car, standard
transmission, to take you seven miles uphill, then seven precipitous miles down a
harrowing dirt road. The road twists along a valley wall held in place by the roots
of dwarf oaks. When I’d visit in the seventies and eighties, I went in my big,
square ’64 Pontiac, which burnt through its brakes the first time down. From then
on the car stayed at China Camp, a hilltop site with primitive facilities. Seven
miles down to Tassajara by foot—bathe in the creek, drink tea generously
provided by the Zen Students, buy a loaf of Tassajara’s renowned bread, sit
zazen in the zendo—then trudge seven miles back to the clatter of crickets. On
one of those trips I heard of a poet who had taken to a daily practice of writing,
and did it as a solitary discipline. So different from the gregarious poets I knew in
the Bay Area!
When I found Gail’s books, I imagined her having stepped from a Japanese Noh
play. Her poems, sharpened by rigorous Buddhist discipline—& not to
everybody’s taste—grabbed me instantly. They were tough, refreshingly hardedged, full of the natural world—constructed of bits and pieces of mineral, insect,
bark, summer grass. They could cry out from the page in several languages at
once, with English functioning (I thought) like a piece of steel to strike the spark.
They felt classical. Despite their wild turns of phrasing, fox barks & cricket clicks,

under the surface they showed a sensibility that was refined, educated, attentive
to natural detail, & enamored of the chipped, the asymmetric, the rustic. They
put me in mind of the writers of Japan’s Heian court, the best of whom were
women. I still hear echoes of Murasaki Shikibu or Ono no Komachi when I open
Gail’s books.
My ear had been tuned to Modernist rhythms & syntax by Pound’s Cantos and
his haunting translation of Noh plays. I’d been schooled in the compressed
poems of Lorine Niedecker and the Objectivists, had started to collect the crisp
haiku-inflected translations of American Indian poems done by Frances
Densmore, and gotten first-hand know-how of Asian poetry through the mustardcrackling syllables of Sanskrit. When I found Gail’s poems, they became instant
companions. I knew she was up to something special. (As) on things which
(headpiece) touches the Moslem was probably the book that first showed me
how my own generation’s often extreme experiments with language—cracking
words apart & recombining syllables or sentences in ways that carried ear &
mind to completely new realms—could be more than politically radical. They
could be ecologically radical, spiritually radical.
I remember many poems by Philip Whalen & Diane di Prima also written at
Tassajara, and maybe some by Norman Fischer or Pat Reed. Once on the
twisty, uphill walk back to China Camp through burnt-over oaks—frightening
wildfire had raced through in ’77 or ’78—ghost faces leapt out where the
firefighter’s axes had slashed through scorched trunks and exposed bright inner
wood. I composed a lengthy poem (thankfully lost long ago) to capture the
California landscape with its Zen center, lizards, and rattlesnakes. Of all the
writing Tassajara’s inspired, though, Gail Sher’s must be the most fully generated
out of that canyon, its geothermal forces, its healing hot springs.
Gail has worked with, & been instrumental in naturalizing to our North American
continent, several Asian poetic traditions. This is something only a Left Coast or
Pacific Rim poet could do with ease, and a direct if invisible lineage runs through
her from the Far East. She has worked haiku and its linked-verse cousin renku.
She has written an autobiographical account of her Buddhist training in haibun
form. More recently, familiarity with yoga practice has drawn her to India’s
musical tradition, and the outcome of this was the serial poem RAGA. In
conversation with Tibetan Buddhism, she also wrote DOHA, a book modeled on
Tibetan songs of devotion and instruction.
Every plant, wild animal, watershed, well-crafted building, every poem or human
being, holds a quality that is the root of its life and spirit. This quality is quite
sharp, objective, wise. It is also creative and fluid so cannot be caught or
described. Matsuo Basho found this spirit to animate haiku, lyric poems, the tea
ceremony, archery. It runs through all of Gail Sher’s poetry—loose, alive,
relaxed, content with imperfection, winding around an inward mystery. Her
writing reveals the finely edged relationship between ourselves and our

surroundings. When I go to her poetry I do it the way I hike into the mountains or
up a gorge, or for that matter step into a temple or meditation hall. I find things
fully alive there. Not opinions, ideas, notions—just the wild spirit of living things.
What is the natural habitat of North American poetry if not the great ecosystem of
the Small Press? An ecosystem comprised of energy pathways, migration
corridors, nutrient exchanges. It is alive with life & death chases, sweeping
unpredictable weather patterns, and acts of breath-taking generosity. Gail’s
poems saw light here: Rosmarie & Keith Waldrop’s Burning Deck Press, Matt &
Sarah Correy’s Rodent Press, Joey Simas’s Moving Letters. But the world of
publishing got rougher in the 1990’s (absorption of corporate publishing houses
into media empires, overthrow of distributors who handle small presses). One
response has been for poets to consolidate their resources. Gail’s poetry has
moved to a new home, Night Crane Press.
Small and micro presses serving the San Francisco Bay Area have taken totem
animals for a long time. White Rabbit, Grey Fox, Coyote Books. Turtle Island fits
in too. Now Night Crane, with its whiff of transient life, is collecting Gail Sher’s
poetry into an online edition. This is a wonderful gathering. Much in these books
will be rough going, though, even for seasoned readers. Tibetan words, Sanskrit,
Hebrew, Japanese. Syllables cobbled into seed-like stanzas that don’t easily
crack. Of course poetry has always been hard to crack. “Don’t follow in the
steps of the old masters,” said one old master, “seek what they sought.” What a
hard lesson.
--Naropa University, Boulder, Colorado
Note: This essay was written for a collected ediiton of Gail Sher's poetry that
was never published as a print volume; instead it introduced the onlline edition of
Gail's poetry on her website, gailsher.com.
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