Hank Lazer
Notes on the Opening Pages of N23
These are the opening pages of N23, and the reading that accompanied their writing (as a reading project and as a source book for quotation) is Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, a book that I came to by means of Robin Blaser’s essays. What is noteworthy in these pages? Perhaps the very first phrases that catch your eye: “what brings you/ here” and “come to think of it” and “for a moment”.
I have been writing these Notebooks for approximately seven years. One book, N18 (complete), was published by Singing Horse Press in 2012. N23, the twenty-third notebook, has a page size of 5” x 7” and is 120 pages long. In this notebook, I have begun and ended with a blank page, thus the first page, represented here, is N23P2 and follows the initial blank page.
I have taken to calling this kind of poetry shape writing. I think that perhaps I am a portal or a medium or a site for its writing. In part, because this kind of writing involves multiple voices, a conversation, a kind of dialectic of thinking, when I return to these pages, I, too, am a reader who arrives at the page with a considerable degree of freshness, confusion, and curiosity. I enjoy reading them and speculating with them, for in the immediacy of writing them I was not their reader. Part of the conversation that the pages induce seems to arise from the anticipation of a reader engaging the page. Returning to these pages, and to N23, I find that often the words of the page have become self-observing, phrases speaking to and commenting upon one another.
These Notebooks, individually and in their totality, are most definitely a journey of sorts. They constitute a kind of spiritual practice. Most often, I write these pages in the early morning. Many days, I begin with a short meditation, zazen, and a period of reading. Eventually, a page may begin to occur. I do not write drafts for these pages; each page is an occurrence in that moment. Thus, the writing is very much akin to improvisation in free jazz, or calligraphy when the calligrapher is beginning without a set text in mind.
I have just returned from two weeks in China – principally Wuhan and Taizhou. This shape writing, apparently, resonates with Chinese readers who associate it with their own traditions of calligraphy and poetry.
“before which the things form and undo themselves” – each page is a unit of composition (and de-composition). I begin by seeing (or fore-seeing) the shape of the writing on the page, or at least some generative, partial element of the page’s shape. And then the writing begins.
Each page is a specific instance of a kind of thinking, of an arising of a shaped thinking: “a dance dancing/ in given/ time & space/ place of day’s/ light”
Though I speak readily of an affinity for this writing with modes of zen practice, the pages are equally Talmudic in their nature, provoking or enacting a conversation, engaging fundamental questions: “a question consonant with the porous being which it questions and from which it obtains not an answer”. To what extent am I thinking through the words of another? For over forty years of writing poetry (as well as in essays), I have been investigating and learning about how one might display, make use of, mouth, write, employ, implore, affirm, question, and engage the words of another.
“a turn in thinking … a human moment given space” – so that, of course, a primary kinship exists between poetry and the motion of consciousness, particularly in its relationship to (or dwelling in) language. A slightly different thinking – another’s – takes a different shape.
As words such as turn and dance and phrases such as things form and undo themselves accumulate in N23 and in the Notebooks generally, perhaps improvisation and the momentary nature of the pages’ composition provides a location for a kind of transcription of consciousness-in-motion, each page being a trace of the contours of consciousness in motion.
“it will take its place among the artefacts and products of culture, as an instance of them” – an apt generalization for the status or instance of each page/poem of the Notebooks. Simply a flat statement – not a claim of “good” or “bad” – a noting of a quality of existence, a context.
At the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s writing and thinking there is an ongoing effort to reawaken us to the enigmatic nature of perception itself: “The world of perception, or in other words the world which is revealed to us by our senses and in everyday life, seems at first sight to be the one we know best of all. For we need neither to measure nor to calculate in order to gain access to this world and it would seem that we can fathom it simply by opening our eyes and getting on with our lives. Yet this is a delusion” (from the first of seven brief radio lectures broadcast in 1948). He concludes “that the world of perception is, to a great extent, unknown territory.”
So too with the pages of the Notebooks and the opening pages of N23. Of course we know how to read. But the appearance and placement of the words of the pages of N23 stop us dead in our tracks; they defamiliarize our automatic, learned ways of reading, compelling us to determine anew where to begin and how to proceed through the writing on the page. As we hold the page and rotate it in order to follow the writing, a different intimacy and physical relationship with the pages gets created. We cannot read these pages (as in standard reading) by letting the page stay still. The voices and vectors of thinking are activated by our movement and tracking of the page, and thus a slightly altered pace and different bodily sensations occur as we read these pages.
These opening pages from N23 also hint at the increased density of writing and thinking present in this notebook. That density can be somewhat forbidding, and thus many initial readings of the pages will become a viewing, an impression based on the shape and the reading of a few phrases. These pages are becoming a hyper-saturated language locale, a place of known (& unknown) language density.
“phrase echoing in the head” becomes a shape as well as a sound, a shape and a phrase placed in a larger echoing field. As we sound out the page – was this not the advice we were given in the early days of elementary school when we learned how to read?; if you got stuck on a word, you were told to “sound it out” – we edge closer to imagining how these pages might be performed. Might readers/speakers be deployed in a way that honors the shape on the page? Might we not make use of several different voices? Might some pages be read aloud consecutively or simultaneously by several voices/persons?
Thus in performance, I have, on occasion, developed ways to embody the poems by multiple voices/persons as the readers/performers consider the pages as scripts to be interpreted and performed. Or, I have worked with soprano saxophone player Andrew Raffo Dewar to develop further improvisations exploring the ways that the saxophone and the words on the page might further the dialog already emerging between “my” words and the quoted material.
& as we see where we are, the reading and the writing become “a perpetual enterprise of taking our bearings”.
The pages of N23 build one place where we might dwell together, in the sounds and shapes of the writing, and in the imagining of how these pages might be manifest further as auditory and visual events.
If you or I as “pilgrim to the blank page” arrive here, and begin to feel that the page is moving toward participating in three dimensions, what you bring to it allows a range of voices and visions to take place. Without you, nothing happens.
Or: “see you again/ some time”
Hank Lazer
June 2013
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
Notes on the Opening Pages of N23
These are the opening pages of N23, and the reading that accompanied their writing (as a reading project and as a source book for quotation) is Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, a book that I came to by means of Robin Blaser’s essays. What is noteworthy in these pages? Perhaps the very first phrases that catch your eye: “what brings you/ here” and “come to think of it” and “for a moment”.
I have been writing these Notebooks for approximately seven years. One book, N18 (complete), was published by Singing Horse Press in 2012. N23, the twenty-third notebook, has a page size of 5” x 7” and is 120 pages long. In this notebook, I have begun and ended with a blank page, thus the first page, represented here, is N23P2 and follows the initial blank page.
I have taken to calling this kind of poetry shape writing. I think that perhaps I am a portal or a medium or a site for its writing. In part, because this kind of writing involves multiple voices, a conversation, a kind of dialectic of thinking, when I return to these pages, I, too, am a reader who arrives at the page with a considerable degree of freshness, confusion, and curiosity. I enjoy reading them and speculating with them, for in the immediacy of writing them I was not their reader. Part of the conversation that the pages induce seems to arise from the anticipation of a reader engaging the page. Returning to these pages, and to N23, I find that often the words of the page have become self-observing, phrases speaking to and commenting upon one another.
These Notebooks, individually and in their totality, are most definitely a journey of sorts. They constitute a kind of spiritual practice. Most often, I write these pages in the early morning. Many days, I begin with a short meditation, zazen, and a period of reading. Eventually, a page may begin to occur. I do not write drafts for these pages; each page is an occurrence in that moment. Thus, the writing is very much akin to improvisation in free jazz, or calligraphy when the calligrapher is beginning without a set text in mind.
I have just returned from two weeks in China – principally Wuhan and Taizhou. This shape writing, apparently, resonates with Chinese readers who associate it with their own traditions of calligraphy and poetry.
“before which the things form and undo themselves” – each page is a unit of composition (and de-composition). I begin by seeing (or fore-seeing) the shape of the writing on the page, or at least some generative, partial element of the page’s shape. And then the writing begins.
Each page is a specific instance of a kind of thinking, of an arising of a shaped thinking: “a dance dancing/ in given/ time & space/ place of day’s/ light”
Though I speak readily of an affinity for this writing with modes of zen practice, the pages are equally Talmudic in their nature, provoking or enacting a conversation, engaging fundamental questions: “a question consonant with the porous being which it questions and from which it obtains not an answer”. To what extent am I thinking through the words of another? For over forty years of writing poetry (as well as in essays), I have been investigating and learning about how one might display, make use of, mouth, write, employ, implore, affirm, question, and engage the words of another.
“a turn in thinking … a human moment given space” – so that, of course, a primary kinship exists between poetry and the motion of consciousness, particularly in its relationship to (or dwelling in) language. A slightly different thinking – another’s – takes a different shape.
As words such as turn and dance and phrases such as things form and undo themselves accumulate in N23 and in the Notebooks generally, perhaps improvisation and the momentary nature of the pages’ composition provides a location for a kind of transcription of consciousness-in-motion, each page being a trace of the contours of consciousness in motion.
“it will take its place among the artefacts and products of culture, as an instance of them” – an apt generalization for the status or instance of each page/poem of the Notebooks. Simply a flat statement – not a claim of “good” or “bad” – a noting of a quality of existence, a context.
At the heart of Merleau-Ponty’s writing and thinking there is an ongoing effort to reawaken us to the enigmatic nature of perception itself: “The world of perception, or in other words the world which is revealed to us by our senses and in everyday life, seems at first sight to be the one we know best of all. For we need neither to measure nor to calculate in order to gain access to this world and it would seem that we can fathom it simply by opening our eyes and getting on with our lives. Yet this is a delusion” (from the first of seven brief radio lectures broadcast in 1948). He concludes “that the world of perception is, to a great extent, unknown territory.”
So too with the pages of the Notebooks and the opening pages of N23. Of course we know how to read. But the appearance and placement of the words of the pages of N23 stop us dead in our tracks; they defamiliarize our automatic, learned ways of reading, compelling us to determine anew where to begin and how to proceed through the writing on the page. As we hold the page and rotate it in order to follow the writing, a different intimacy and physical relationship with the pages gets created. We cannot read these pages (as in standard reading) by letting the page stay still. The voices and vectors of thinking are activated by our movement and tracking of the page, and thus a slightly altered pace and different bodily sensations occur as we read these pages.
These opening pages from N23 also hint at the increased density of writing and thinking present in this notebook. That density can be somewhat forbidding, and thus many initial readings of the pages will become a viewing, an impression based on the shape and the reading of a few phrases. These pages are becoming a hyper-saturated language locale, a place of known (& unknown) language density.
“phrase echoing in the head” becomes a shape as well as a sound, a shape and a phrase placed in a larger echoing field. As we sound out the page – was this not the advice we were given in the early days of elementary school when we learned how to read?; if you got stuck on a word, you were told to “sound it out” – we edge closer to imagining how these pages might be performed. Might readers/speakers be deployed in a way that honors the shape on the page? Might we not make use of several different voices? Might some pages be read aloud consecutively or simultaneously by several voices/persons?
Thus in performance, I have, on occasion, developed ways to embody the poems by multiple voices/persons as the readers/performers consider the pages as scripts to be interpreted and performed. Or, I have worked with soprano saxophone player Andrew Raffo Dewar to develop further improvisations exploring the ways that the saxophone and the words on the page might further the dialog already emerging between “my” words and the quoted material.
& as we see where we are, the reading and the writing become “a perpetual enterprise of taking our bearings”.
The pages of N23 build one place where we might dwell together, in the sounds and shapes of the writing, and in the imagining of how these pages might be manifest further as auditory and visual events.
If you or I as “pilgrim to the blank page” arrive here, and begin to feel that the page is moving toward participating in three dimensions, what you bring to it allows a range of voices and visions to take place. Without you, nothing happens.
Or: “see you again/ some time”
Hank Lazer
June 2013
Tuscaloosa, Alabama