What Were You Thinking, Essays 2006-2024
Hank Lazer

Just released, from Hank Lazer, twenty years of essays (2006-2024) on contemporary poetry and poetics exploring spirituality, ethics, and international perspectives through talks and exchanges in China and Cuba, with interviews exploring Lazer’s innovative poetry and poetics.  What Were You Thinking is a companion volume to the simultaneous publication of Abundant Life: New & Selected Poems (Chax Press, 2025). 

—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.