In 2024, Chase Twichell—whose poems I’d always admired, but who I’d never met in person—invited me to her writing retreat in Keene, New York. That July I stayed on her property for ten days, in a gloriously simple log cabin, working on poems and essays. I took a hike every day with her labradoodle Rebus, and at dinner had great conversations with Twichell and the other guests. I was warming up to Zen at that time, and found myself asking her—one afternoon, while chatting in her garden—if she might be open to doing an interview about the links between poetry and Zen. She agreed, but then I let an entire year pass by. This past summer I began attending the Upper Valley Zen Center in White River Junction in Vermont, where I live, and found myself reading—side by side, by chance—Twichell’s 1998 book The Snow Watcher and Suzuki’s seminal Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. That seemed propitious. I reached out to Twichell, and she was happy to do the interview with me.
The Snow Watcher begins with an epigraph from Zen master Dōgen: “To study the buddha way is to study the self. To study the self is to forget the self. To forget the self is to be actualized by myriad things.” This notion of being “actualized” by things—which describes, I think, the relationship between no-self and the myriad things around us—feels central to poetry. Perhaps Dōgen is suggesting that if we loosen our grip on our egos, we could see the world more clearly. The Snow Watcher is full of this kind of illumination. We trust Twichell’s unsentimental view of nature: “I can see a little way // into the mystery of the lichens, / and they into mine. // My eyes flow over them / and vanish in the grass river, / which pours itself into the wind.” Here the poet on a walk encounters lichens, without ego. Because her gaze is open, the lichens are limitless: they look back, leading her (and us) into a deeper experience with the myriad things: the grass, the river, the wind.
We met on Zoom in July 2025: Twichell in her study in Keene, New York, surrounded by books; I in my living room in Vermont, a ceiling fan turning above, my old tomcat asleep by the window. With The Snow Watcher and Suzuki’s book in hand, my intention was to ask about connections between Zen and poetry. From there our conversation drifted to politics, visual art, wasps, and the limits of language.
— John Wall Barger for Guernica
John Wall Barger: Your enthusiasm for Zen comes through in The Snow Watcher.
Chase Twichell: That was my Baby Zen book, written during my very earnest first few years of Zen training. I was going to be such a good student, and turned out to be such a bad student!
John Wall Barger: The book, to me, looks directly at the world with a ferocious eye. Like the snow here: “If ever I flee to wilderness to die, / it will be to snow. Thus this snow / at bed time comforts me.”
Chase Twichell: I was trying to absorb what I was learning and apply it to my life, which wasn’t easy. Trying to see things exactly as they are, without all the various spins that mind imposes on them.
John Wall Barger: That’s my next question! Suzuki Roshi says, “The true purpose is to see things as they are, and to let everything go as it goes.”
Chase Twichell: Right. Suzuki Roshi called it “things as it is.” I stole that for the title of a book (Things as It Is, 2018). A monk was transcribing one of his dharma talks and came across the phrase. He suggested that his teacher correct it to proper English, “things as they are,” but Suzuki said, “No, what I meant is ‘things as it is.’”
John Wall Barger: There’s something about embracing mistakes which seems important to poetry and to Zen. Suzuki Roshi writes, “According to Dōgen, one continuous mistake can also be Zen.”
Chase Twichell: I confess I find Dōgen mostly inscrutable. Mistakes in perception are interesting, though, as are mistakes in poems. Spotting and correcting an error (perceptual, emotional, logical) is a way of clarifying, right? Part of the continuous process of seeing whatever it is without the infinite varieties of camouflage we invent to keep ourselves from the truth. For me, writing poems is a way of forcing myself to confront the truth of whatever it is I’m looking at. When I became a student of Zen, I was drawn by its insistence on perceiving the essential nature of things.
John Wall Barger: Some poetry these days feels like it’s trying to force ideology onto language.
Chase Twichell: It sure does, and that’s a good example of what we’re talking about. The poems I most love go where they go without thinking. That’s why they can’t be paraphrased, and why they perplex readers who expect to be able to understand them with the same mind that they use to read the newspaper, for example. When a poem has an ideological mission, it knows where it wants to go, and turns its back on all the other possible destinations. The most powerful poems are those that discover where they want to go in the process of their writing, and that involves being open to not knowing what that is for a while. That’s uncomfortable, even scary, but also exciting. I’m not saying that thinking has no place in the making of poems. The tracks that the mind makes on paper as it moves along can be fascinating. But when a poem sets out to persuade us of something, it relinquishes the more subtle and profound adventure of asking itself to discover something new. I’m not saying that thinking is an enemy of poetry. But when it’s the only driver, the train stays on its predictable track.
In a weird way, the process of writing is like zazen. You sit, and for a moment there’s clarity. Then Oops, I’m thinking again. Over and over. Some people enter deep states of concentration, but in all my years of sitting I’ve never experienced what’s called “body and mind falling away.” I used to attend a lot of sesshins [week-long periods of intense practice, with many hours of meditation] and afterward I’d hear people talking about how profound their experience was, how restorative, and I’d be thinking, What?? My knees hurt, my back hurts, I can’t wait to get the fuck out of here! [laughs].
John Wall Barger: That’s not very enlightened of you!
Chase Twichell: I’m most definitely not enlightened. But what I was trying to get at is the conflict between the two kinds of mind. In zazen, as in writing the first draft of a poem, it’s crucial to focus one’s attention not on what you know, but on what you don’t. How do you enter that zone in which everything is still unknown and stay there long enough to perceive something new? The mind wants to tie things up, label them; it dislikes ambiguity and unanswered questions. But that’s exactly where real poems are born: out of not-knowing. An interesting example (and a big problem for Zen poets) is metaphor. Zen tries to see things as they are, but metaphor asks us to view one thing in terms of another.
John Wall Barger: I thought you were going the other way with that: to say that with metaphor we can interrupt our overly-logical minds, in a useful way, like a Zen koan.
Chase Twichell: Well, that’s interesting. A metaphor as a kind of koan. That’s a good can opener—it gives me a new way to see the quandary. A metaphor is a kind of Venn diagram (remember those from grade school?): two circles overlapping. What’s in the overlap is what’s important. When a blue circle and a yellow circle overlap, the common ground is green. Here’s an example from the British poet John Clare: “The haughty thistle o’er all danger towers, / In every place the very wasp of flowers.” Now of course, a thistle and a wasp are not alike. One’s a plant, the other an insect. But what they share is that sting. A good metaphor singles out the sameness in two things that are essentially unlike. But in Zen terms, does that make us see either the thistle or the wasp more clearly? I don’t think so. Because we’re looking at something that the mind has constructed and overlaid on the world.
John Wall Barger: Your poems sometimes use the world to talk about the mind, rather than the other way around. Like here: “Various thoughts batter the one window, / big moths in moonlight.”
Chase Twichell: Zen is a study of the mind. If you do it long enough, you start paying close attention to what the mind is doing at any given moment. In a weird way, it’s like learning metrics in poetry. At first you’re counting stresses, syllables. It paralyzes you with self-consciousness. But eventually your ear becomes tuned to hear the patterns and their variations, and you no longer have to think about it. It becomes part of what you might call instinct, or intuition. Studying the mind is that way, too: you learn to observe its movements and patterns without chasing them. You note them, then let them go. Most of them don’t go anywhere new anyway!
John Wall Barger: At times your poems distinguish between mind and self: “Snow holds back the dawn— / an extra minute of lying here / while the self sleeps on.”
Chase Twichell: My understanding is that mind creates the self. Suzuki Roshi said, “It’s not that there’s no self. It’s just that it doesn’t exist.” The self isn’t fixed: it’s constantly being invented, reinvented by the mind. If you keep journals, you see that what you remember and what you recorded are often at odds, sometimes even contradictory.
I’ve kept journals for sixty years—proof that what I actually thought at the time is not what I think I thought at the time. I’m basically calling myself out as a liar, page after page, year after year. I’m (still) in the process of inventing myself. I can see my mind, at any particular time in the past, like a bunch of little workmen with hammers and saws, racing around, trying to create a creature. At the time, of course, I saw the work as going deeper and deeper, closer and closer to the truth. But I was actually creating a palimpsest of lies, or, to be a little kinder to myself, a palimpsest of imaginary selves.
John Wall Barger: I like it when, in some of your poems, language reaches the edge of what it can say. Then comes a kind of threshold: “Look, a yellow tulip / in the charcoal sky— / a vividness passing so quickly / I have to abandon the poem / to follow it.”
Chase Twichell: Right. In order to perceive something fully, you have to let go of trying to hold onto it. To really perceive it, you have to not try to catch it. Not try to own it, not try to put it in a cage.
John Wall Barger: The way your poems talk about nature lacks all sentimentality. I think of R.H. Blyth’s famous definition: Sentimentality is pouring more emotion into something than God does.
Chase Twichell: I think it was Stevens who said that sentimentality is a failure of feeling. Since childhood, nature has been my god, by which I mean it has seemed to me the one power higher than humanity, capable of teaching us, rewarding us, punishing us, with or without explanation. I had the good fortune to grow up in the largest surviving wilderness east of the Rockies: the Adirondacks in upstate New York. My childhood was privileged but rough, and my solace was the woods.
John Wall Barger: Last year when I stayed with you at East Hill and was stung by a wasp, you marched out and sprayed the nest. It was not a moment of hippy reverence.
Chase Twichell: [Laughs] I had to zap another one last night. Nature is a big, rough god. But also a beautiful god. And we’re now in the position of being more powerful than it is, because we can destroy it. That inversion terrifies me. I no longer have any hope that the world I loved, the world I was born into in 1950, is healable. It seems to me to be injured beyond repair. It’ll survive in some form or other, mutate, adapt, but the original natural world is mortally wounded.
John Wall Barger: That’s so difficult to accept. Does Zen provide any solace, for those of us trying to look at the world directly?
Chase Twichell: Zen says: old age, illness, and death are part and parcel of everything. I keep the Five Contemplations taped to my computer:
- I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
- I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape ill health.
- I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
- All that is dear to me, and everyone I love, are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
- My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground on which I stand.
That last one, that’s the one that guts me.
John Wall Barger: Would you agree that both Zen and poetry see the world as non-dualistic? I feel that both try to dispel with oversimplified binaries: good/bad, mind/body, them/us. Assuming that the world is non-dualistic—as I think it is—then this seeing can be thought of as an extension of, as you already mentioned, letting the world be what it is.
Chase Twichell: I can only speak to my own limited understanding. There’s a useful Zen saying (I’m not sure of its origin): “Not one, not two.” It’s not that there are no differences between things. Hot is hot and cold is cold. But hot is hot in relation to cold; you need one to define the other. If you extend that to questions about the self, for example about the difference between self and other, I think Zen would say they’re interdependent.
John Wall Barger: Suzuki Roshi seems to warn against intellectual understanding, by which perhaps he means dualistic thinking?
Chase Twichell: Yes, conceptual thought is the bad guy that creates duality. In poetry, conceptual thinking gets in the way of other kinds of perception. Great poetry can’t be paraphrased because it can’t be reduced to literalness and logic. Take this line from Galway Kinnell: “the luminous / beach dust pounded out of funeral shells.” What does it “mean”? It’s a description of sand, right? Sand is luminous because it’s composed of pulverized shells, which are nacreous. He doesn’t mention the waves that smash the shells, but the word “pounding” calls them up. And the shells are “funeral” because they’re the empty houses of the creatures that made them, now dead. All that in nine words! It can be explained, but not paraphrased.
John Wall Barger: Yes! The best poetry uses that kind of non-logic. It doesn’t tell us how to feel. The mind wants to put things on a shelf, in categories, so that we can stop thinking about it.
Chase Twichell: Right.
John Wall Barger: So how can we find words that don’t fall into dualistic or intellectual traps? This brings me back to the inadequacy of language. In “Makeshifts” you say, “Here’s a little bouquet—ice / and evergreen and sun, three moments / arranged for human looking, / though it’s only the husks of their names / that I’ve gathered and paralyzed.”
Chase Twichell: Words point, without trying to freeze something into a concept. The classic Zen example is the finger pointing at the moon.
John Wall Barger: If language is a husk, and the physical object—the “it”—is not there, does that indicate an emptiness in the middle of things?
Chase Twichell: I don’t know how to define emptiness. I asked a monk friend what it meant. I said, “Does it mean everything is fluid? That nothing has a fixed form? So nothing is static, therefore nothing is permanent?” And he said, “Kind of.” So that’s about as close as I’ve gotten to it. [laughs]
John Wall Barger: Did Buddha say that everything moves toward nothing? So maybe all things are just passing through, from nothing to nothing.
Chase Twichell: Except plastic.
John Wall Barger: Ski boots!
Chase Twichell: I’m actually very lapsed as a Zen student. I was a dedicated student for years. I became a formal student in 1995, at Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, NY.
John Wall Barger: Is that when The Snow Watcher came into being?
Chase Twichell: I’d been there for four or five years before that book came out, because I was writing poems all during that time. I sat zazen every day, read constantly—even when I couldn’t understand it, as with Dōgen—and went to sesshin multiple times a year. I jumped through all the hoops to become a formal student, twice. My first teacher was John Daido Loori. He was ferocious. I never really clicked with him, and I kept thinking it was my fault. Eventually I realized, no, not everyone finds the right teacher on the first try. I left for a while, then went back, and later studied with Geoffrey Shugen Arnold.
Eventually I began to feel frustrated. You’re not supposed to get anything from zazen, I know. But I’d sit for hours and wonder: is this really the best use of my time? I could be working in a homeless shelter. At some point, I stopped. Then felt guilty. Then started again. Then stopped. In the last decade or so, my practice has become much less disciplined, so I’m kind of talking history here.
John Wall Barger: One last question. When did you know you were a poet?
Chase Twichell: In fifth grade, our art teacher got sick and they brought in a Yale grad student named George Chaplin, who was a genius. He’d never taught kids before, so he just taught us what he was learning from studying color theory with Josef Albers. He gave us decks of color cards and asked us to play games with them, like “Find three colors, and put them in a row so that the middle one looks farther away.” It was play. He was my teacher until I was sent away to boarding school at 14. I’d gotten so obsessed with painting that my parents were afraid I’d suffer socially, so I wasn’t allowed to take art classes. I got my revenge by starting to write poems. [laughs] OK, if I can’t paint, I’m going to do something even weirder. School was a nightmare. Poetry was my escape. I wanted to write paintings.