Eric Raanan Fischman is an American poet, teacher, editor, and literary organizer whose work connects contemplative practice, rhythm, humor, spacious form, collaboration, and literary community. Based in Colorado, he has participated in the Boulder and Denver poetry communities through teaching, readings, workshops, publishing projects, and literary events.
Fischman studied at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, an environment shaped by experimental writing, contemplative practice, performance, and Beat and post-Beat traditions. His recent work includes the collaborative book Lily in a Codebox, created with Lee Frankel-Goldwater and published in 2025.
Mordy Gets Enlightened
Mordy Gets Enlightened follows a comic and spiritual imagination through poems that test the language of revelation against everyday confusion. Absurdity, vulnerability, self-scrutiny, ecstatic possibility, and ordinary experience share the same field.
The title itself gives enlightenment a character and a plot. “Mordy” sounds specific, ordinary, and socially located; “gets enlightened” sounds like an event whose spiritual magnitude can be narrated almost casually.
This tonal mixture allows metaphysical pressure to remain close to comedy and daily life.
Contemplative poetics
Contemplative practice changes the scale of attention through repeated return to breath, sensation, thought, silence, and the changing present.
Poetry can use the same attentional habits. A phrase is heard closely; a pause gains weight; a repeated image becomes a site of return; the reader becomes aware of the interval between thoughts.
Lauren Shufran’s contemplative poetics offers a neighboring practice where literary form, close reading, mindfulness, and attention remain tightly connected.
Rhythm and space
Fischman’s poems often use spacious syntax, repetition, interruption, and changes of pace to make thought physically present on the page. Silence and spacing can carry pressure alongside the spoken phrase.
White space creates duration. A phrase separated from another may feel meditative, comic, hesitant, or emphatic according to its position.
Shira Dentz’s visual syntax provides another route into the way spacing, sound, fragment, and page architecture influence the temporal experience of reading.
Humor and spiritual pressure
Comic timing is central to Fischman’s poetic voice. A spiritual question may arrive through an awkward conversation, a joke may open into self-recognition, and an apparently casual line may acquire philosophical force through repetition.
Humor gives abstraction a human scale. Revelation can be grand in theory and ridiculous in circumstance because the person seeking it still occupies an ordinary body and social world.
This tonal flexibility keeps spiritual inquiry responsive to embarrassment, friendship, appetite, distraction, and the unpredictability of everyday life.
Naropa and literary lineage
Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School has long connected experimental poetry, Buddhist practice, performance, oral transmission, and alternative literary education.
Studying in that environment places Fischman inside a lineage where poetry is learned through books and through readings, conversation, workshops, and direct contact among writers.
Cedar Sigo’s Naropa-shaped poetry offers a neighboring example of literary lineage carried through teaching, performance, friendship, quotation, and small-press culture.
Boulder and Denver literary community
Fischman has worked as a teacher and literary organizer in Colorado. Workshops, readings, editorial projects, and community calendars have given him a practical role in the circulation of poetry around Boulder and Denver.
Such work gives literary community infrastructure. A poem reaches readers through rooms, schedules, invitations, publications, websites, and people willing to maintain continuity.
This public activity extends the social dimension of Fischman’s poems, where language often feels made and tested in company.
Lily in a Codebox
Lily in a Codebox, created with Lee Frankel-Goldwater, extends Fischman’s interest in experimental structures, shared authorship, and digital-era language.
The title places an organic name inside a technological container. “Lily” suggests plant, person, beauty, growth, and traditional lyric image; “codebox” suggests interface, software, formal limitation, and computational environment.
The combination creates a contemporary tension between organic and programmed structures.
Collaboration
Collaboration changes poetic authorship by making response central. One writer’s language becomes the condition through which another writer continues, interrupts, or redirects the work.
Sheila E. Murphy’s long collaborative practice provides another example of shared composition developing through exchange, seriality, and the gradual formation of a distributed voice.
Fischman’s collaborative work makes social relation part of form and gives experimental structure a lived interpersonal dimension.
Digital-era language
The “codebox” also points toward contemporary environments where writing happens through screens, interfaces, files, platforms, and software.
Digital language carries visual and procedural features that can become poetic materials: brackets, prompts, boxes, cursors, commands, and the relation between visible text and hidden systems.
Lewis LaCook’s digital and generative poetry offers a neighboring practice in which software, interface, input, and literary language operate within the same compositional field.
Teaching and attention
Teaching gives Fischman another social form for poetic attention. A workshop asks writers to listen closely, describe effects, revise language, and encounter several aesthetic approaches in the same room.
These practices resemble contemplative discipline through repeated attention and return. Reading becomes an active process shaped by patience and responsiveness.
The classroom also helps literary community persist by turning individual practice into shared inquiry.
Contemplative experiment
Fischman’s work joins contemplative practice with experimental form through rhythm, spaciousness, comedy, collaboration, and community. Attention provides continuity across these activities.
This gives him a distinctive place within contemporary American poetry. Spiritual inquiry, Naropa lineage, Colorado literary life, digital-era collaboration, and comic lyric pressure remain active inside a practice committed to presence and relation.