Description
Hank Lazer
What Were You Thinking: Essays 2006–2024
552 Pages / Essays
978-1-956921-35-9 (pbk. $39.95)
February 1, 2025 (pre-order available)
Twenty years of essays and critical writing from the prolific poet Hank Lazer, including meditations on the current state of poetry, along with interviews, book reviews, and questions of Jewish poetics.
—From the Foreword by Charles Bernstein:
What the devil is the spiritual and why do those who flaunt it do so much to discredit it? Hank Lazer asks the same about the lyric, as part of his quest, in these essays, interviews, and commentaries, to reclaim lyric and spirit for an active poetics of invention and improvisation. You could also turn this topsy-turvy: Lazer questions the aversion to lyric and spirit in much of the poetry that claims the mantle of the new. In his gentle way, Lazer shows how old hat that can be. In so doing, he shows the “innovative necessity” (Kathleen Fraser’s phrase) of transvaluing “transvaluation”: not letting the transgressions of youth become the shibboleths of old age. There is an urgent politics here, in a time where liberalism’s illiberalism haunts our haunts and bedevils our democratic vistas.
Grace, says Hank. He’s not talking about a benediction before meals or the fact that some are destined to be saved while the rest of us, well, ain’t. Or dear old Grace, the manager of the local General Store. Lazer keeps discovering grace in unlikely places, offering not answers to our metaphysical questions, but a way to carry on, as at a wild party, or while handwriting a poem, or when returning care to a caregiver in the ICU. Grace is present in Hank’s patience, his refusal to be belligerent, his lucid calm (and calm lucidity). And in his commitment to inconstancy—“mirrored in artistic and improvisational activity.”
For Lazer, poetry has the capacity to celebrate not being present; it offers a way out of the emotional coercion, bordering on sentimentality, that demands presence to authenticate lyricism. Lazer’s poetics advocates being present to the inability to be present; indeed, he values a refusal to be present, even a resistance to presence. He warns that a rhetoric of presence may fall into a trap of naming. As Lazer wryly observes—the demand for lyric presence can be used to exclude what is present in the name of being present. For similar reasons, being mindful in poetry, in the sense of putting virtuousness before experience, can be a kind of mindlessness, just as religiosity is a mask of technorationality.
Table of Contents
Foreword by Charles Bernstein
That’s a Big Reach:
Of Course Poetry Is Difficult / Poetry Is Not Difficult
American Poetry and Its Institutions in the 21st Century
Grace, & the Spiritual Reach of Representation
Poetry and Community: Of Being Numerous, Sometimes
Jewish Questions:
Who or What Is a Jewish-American Poet, with Specific Reference to David Antin, Charles Bernstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Jerome Rothenberg
Is There a Distinctive Jewish Poetics? Several? Many? Is There Any Question?
Making Jewish
Traveling the Red Road:
Two Recommendations: The Poetry of George Oppen and Larry Eigner (Or, The Peculiarities of the Making of Cross-Cultural Literary History)
Ethical Criticism and the Challenges Posed by Innovative Poetry
Writing Poetry That Focuses on the Autobiographical
Three Meetings with Juan Carlos Flores
Readings:
David Antin’s Wondrous X-Ray Machine, Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature 1966–2005
Susan M. Schultz’s Dementia Blog: The Poetry of Fact and the Pedagogy of Dementia
Reading John Taggart’s “Henry David Thoreau / Sonny Rollins”
a way to stay true to what arises: Gillian Parrish’s of rain and nettles wove
Lissa Wolsak’s Squeezed Light: Collected Poems 1994–2005: Thinking of Spirit and Spiritual
Clearly Enigmatic: Glenn Mott’s Analects on a Chinese Screen
Yingelishi: Chanted Songs Beautiful Poetry, Jonathan Stalling
Welling, Replenishing: Richard Berengarten’s Changing and the I Ching
Ladders of Light: Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s A Treatise On Stars
“Its human summary if nothing else”: On Robert Creeley’s On Earth: Last Poems and an Essay
Norman Fischer’s Nature: Recomposing Emerson’s Nature
Three Humdingers: Rodger Kamenetz’s The Missing Jew: Poems 1976–2022; Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Selected Poems 1980–2020; Gary Snyder’s Collected Poems
All Elegy: What Are Poems for in a Destitute Time? — Joseph Lease’s Fire Season
Interviews & Conversations:
Marjorie Perloff Interview with Hank Lazer
“Talk Show”—Conversation with Glenn Mott
Exchange with Hank Lazer on Thinking in Jewish, N 20
Interview with Gillian Parrish (Mothership) for SPACECRAFTPROJECT
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