ART
by John High
About the artist:
Zen monk and poet, Ninso John High is the recipient of four Fulbrights and has been awarded two National Endowment for the Arts fellowships (fiction and translation) and a 2020 National Endowment for the Humanities for a translation project of Osip Mandelstam’s Voronezh Notebooks. He is the author of numerous books of poetry, fiction, and translation–the most recent, Without Dragons, Even the Emperor Would Be Lonely (Wet Cement Press, 2020) and vanishing acts, a work of cross-genre writings (Talisman House, 2018). The poems excerpted here are from a work-in-progress: Scrolls of A Temple Sweeper. A founder and former director of the LIU, Brooklyn MFA Program–with Lewis Warsh, before the pandemic, he was on pilgrimage working with children, teachers, social workers, and writers, facilitating workshops in creative transformation in Cambodia, China, and Portugal.
