Marjorie Perloff
An Interview with Hank Lazer
1.MGP: Hank, in your memoir for Contemporary Authors, you give a wonderful account of a happy “normal” childhood in San Jose, and then an equally happy high school period, what with your 4.0 average and becoming valedictorian. It’s an unlikely background for a poet, and you even say that both in high school and at Stanford, you “struggled a bit with English.” Why do you think that was the case and how did you ever discover your vocation for poetry?
HL: I really don’t think of my childhood as “happy” or “normal,” though perhaps every childhood has its mixture of happiness and unhappiness and is, in its particularity, not exactly “normal.” My social world consisted almost entirely of a set of family relations – grandparents (Russians Jews who came to the US in the 1915-1920 period, and who, for most of my life, lived within walking distance of our house), my great aunt and uncle (lived next door to us, and their youngest son, Ben, and I were like brothers). Sort of a California version of the shtetl. I did well in school, but it was not an especially happy place for me. I played sports (mainly basketball and golf), but I had skipped a grade in school and my growth spurt was late, so, at the start of my junior year in high school I was 5’6” and 99 lbs. (I’m now 6’ and 190 lbs.) I was the class valedictorian with a 4.0 (in an era when that was a rarity), but such accomplishments felt like the norm among the few Jewish families – my parents’ duplicate bridge group, for example – scattered throughout San Jose. There were fewer than 10 Jews in my high school; the one temple drew from entire county. In high school, I excelled in math, not English. I think that boys mature more slowly, and the emotional and psychological nuances (or basics!) required for understanding literature were not part of my makeup, thus the ability to read and engage deeply with literature developed later in my life. I was, though, always a reader. I can remember the summer (1965) I spent in Berkeley attending a National Science Foundation summer math program for high school students; I neglected my math studies for reading (and haunting the wonderful used book stores), playing ping pong with the international students at International House where I was living, attending folk music concerts (I met Mississippi Fred McDowell), and taking part in political demonstrations.
The more intense turn to poetry began when my cousin Ben introduced me to the work of Allen Ginsberg. This would have been in 1965 or 1966, and I can remember reading Howl and thinking this was very different than what we were reading and analyzing in our high school classes. I began Stanford in 1967, and my early classes focused on math and the sciences, and I thought I would be pre-med. In the fall of my sophomore year, I took a course from Al Gelpi – an Early American Literature class – and he required us to attend a poetry reading. The readers – and this was my first poetry reading – were Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov. Quite a beginning! I can still remember how mesmerizing it was to hear Duncan read “Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar,” – to watch him move his right hand as he seemed to conduct the reading of the poem.
In college, too, I was somewhat of a loner, and I never really plugged into any poetry writing scene per se. I suppose that the choice to pursue literary studies and to become a poet appealed to me as something that no one else in my family had done. We had doctors and lawyers, a theoretical physicist, and so forth, but no poets. And unlike the extraordinarily finite nature of accomplishment in the sciences, in a perverse way I was drawn to the vexing indefiniteness of accomplishment in poetry. I remember reading a Paris Review interview with T. S. Eliot, and he told the interviewer that truly he did not know if he had written a good poem. That sort of relationship – or non-relationship, the opposite of the grade point average and test score mentality? – to accomplishment or excellence intrigued me.
At Stanford, in my senior year I developed a strong interest in the work of Gaston Bachelard and wrote a rather theoretical paper that pointed toward a phenomenology of reading. In our senior honors seminar we were reading C. S. Lewis’ An Experiment in Criticism – remember, this was prior to the influx of French theory into English departments. Along with a few other students, I developed a literary magazine, Glosses, that published critical writing. (The magazine had a life of only one or two issues.) I wrote my honors thesis on Blake’s early poetry. But in the spring of 1971, I traveled around in Europe, beginning in England, and I immediately knew that when I returned to the US for grad school that I would be focusing on American (not British) literature.
I would also add that during these early years, when I was first turning to poetry with some intensity, I also was developing a strong interest in jazz and in the blues, interests that continue to this day and that /have had a deep influence on my writing.
2. MGP: At Virginia, where you received your PhD, you studied Lowell, Plath, Berryman, etc. with Alan Williamson. I can certainly see Lowell’s influence in a poem like “1616 Hester Avenue,” included in Doublespace. And “Elegy for my Grandfather, Charles Goodman” reminds me a bit of the Winslow Elegies which I love. Can you say something about this early Lowell strain? Do you read much Robert Lowell now?
HL: My first semester in graduate school at Virginia, Fall 1971, I took a Contemporary American Poetry survey course from Alan Williamson. We used the Poulin anthology (then in its first edition), and we spent nearly half of the semester reading Lowell (as Alan had studied with Lowell at Harvard and was a sort of Lowell protégé). But I never really bought in to the Lowell celebration. I came to poetry, and to Virginia, from a Bay Area ethos – with the assumption that poetry was an act of mental health, not a celebration of psychological distress. The last day of our last class on Lowell, Alan peered over his briefcase and asked us what we thought of Lowell. I immediately raised my hand and said that I thought he was vastly over-rated and that we had spent far too much of the semester reading his work.
Alan did introduce me to many other poets whose work I continue to read, most especially Rilke. His teaching of Plath’s work was superb. Lowell, late in his life, visited Virginia and gave an excellent and very moving retrospective reading. I was most drawn to his late work.
And Alan was not the only poetry teacher at UVa. One year, fresh from the publication of his Yale prize book Field Guide, Robert Hass was in residence. Diane Wakoski taught as a visiting poet, and she introduced us to the American Poetry Review (the very first issue, with David Ignatow on the cover), to the work of Jerome Rothenberg, Clayton Eshleman, and David Antin, among others. And eventually Alan left and was replaced by Gregory Orr, whose interest in a wide-range of European poets and painters proved very helpful to me.
So, as we say in the South, Lowell never “floated my boat,” and I do not read Lowell today.
3. MGP: In these Virginia years, you evidently discovered Heidegger and also such poets from the anti-Lowell camp as Jerome Rothenberg and Clayton Eshleman. How did you then—and how do you now—justify your particular form of eclecticism? On the one hand, you were participating, from Stanford on, in left-wing political action; on the other, you were reading Heidegger. Did the latter’s anti-Semitism not bother you? And where did you stand in the ongoing controversy between New American Poets and the more Establishment contingent? Is bridging the gap between such groups a form of negative capability or is it, as some might charge, a lack of firm principle, aesthetic or philosophical?
HL: The Lowell camp, as I noted above, never held much interest for me, with the possible exception of Sylvia Plath’s poetry and John Berryman’s first Dream Songs. I was more of a partisan for deep image poetry and related writings: James Wright, Galway Kinnell, early work by W. S. Merwin. Through the work of Robert Bly, particularly his work as a translator and editor, I read a great deal of European and South American poetry: Neruda, Lorca, Vallejo, Trakl, Tranströmer, and others. At Virginia, I resumed my study of Spanish, and I did quite a bit of translation (particularly of Neruda and Alfonsina Storni). I also took a graduate seminar in the work of Kierkegaard.
As for the anthology wars, during my grad school time at Virginia, I was rather ignorant of that polarity. I knew that I had plenty of reading to do – a sense that I needed to catch up – and I read widely in twentieth-century poetry, mostly on my own. (I have always been an extremely stubborn, independent student.) Eventually, I became a devoted reader of Louis Simpson’s work – that compressed, anecdotal, Chekhovian mode of poetic composition became an important model for me.
Probably the most important part of my academic studies at Virginia had to do with nineteenth-century American Literature, particularly the American Renaissance. I did lots of reading of Thoreau, Emerson, Melville (all the novels), Hawthorne, Whitman, and Poe (literally everything he wrote). Much of my teaching at Alabama focused on 19th-century American literature. My favorite seminar that I taught at Alabama was on Thoreau, Cage, Dickinson, and Susan Howe.
My reading of Heidegger began at Virginia, on my own. I remember that a section of Poetry, Language, Thought appeared in an early issue of The American Poetry Review. I bought the book and loved it. I was especially moved by Heidegger’s sense of poetry as an essential thinking and the poet (with Rilke as the primary example) as one who, in language, explores and dares the ad-venture in being. Heidegger’s linkage of language and being – their inextricable mutuality – fascinated me, and ultimately sketched out a direction (eventually) for my poetry and essay-writing. I continued to read whatever of Heidegger’s work (with the exception of Being and Time) was available in translation. As for Being and Time, in the 1970s I felt unprepared to read that big book (due to the fact that I had little background in the history of philosophy) and delayed reading it until I began the Notebooks in 2006.
Did Heidegger’s anti-Semitism bother me? No. I was not reading Heidegger biographically; I was unaware of his anti-Semitism; I was reading him for what he had to say about language and being and for his insights into the work of Hölderlin, Trakl, and Rilke. Later, years later, learning of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, yes, it bothered me. But I still would and do read him, and I read a great deal of Levinas, who, as you know, was Heidegger’s colleague and friend. The identity politics litmus tests that are now so prevalent in literary evaluations were not so prominent in the mid-1970s. In retrospect, Naziism is clearly present in Heidegger’s writing -- I see it in the totalizing tendencies throughout his work. My reading (several years ago, as part of the Notebooks project) of Levinas' Totality and Infinity was most clarifying with respect to the authoritarian implications of Heidegger’s tendency to totalize -- to gather disparate elements under a single authority. Ultimately, I come down on Levinas’ side of this important difference, siding with infinity (or small b being) rather than totality (or large B Being). That valuing of particulars is, I think, ethical in nature, but also has implications for one’s poetics – bearing affinities to Objectivism, to Buddhist thinking, to the work of someone like Eigner or Oppen (as in “Of Being Numerous”).
Today, and along the way, I have thought with some amusement about my “bad” identity politics in terms of the writers whose work has mattered so much to me over the years. I am definitely a Jewish Buddhist agnostic (from California, and now a Southerner, since 1971), yet many of the most important writers to me have been New England WASPS such as Thoreau and Creeley. Or, as you point out, the anti-Semitic Heidegger. Like any writer, I am drawn toward work that excites me and that is of immediate use. As Taggart puts it, one “proceeds from need.… One goes, searches where one must to find the right materials and tools for the job at hand” (“A Preface,” in Songs of Degrees, p. 71). And of course there is a long list of Jewish poets/writers whose work has become deeply important to me – Jabes, Levinas, Celan, Oppen, Norman Fischer, Rachel Back, Jacques Derrida, Larry Eigner, Tom Mandel, Rodger Kamenetz, and so on… And I am equally drawn to a range of poets –John Taggart, Lissa Wolsak, Robert Duncan, Paul Naylor, Ronald Johnson, Peter O’Leary – whose spiritually-oriented work is not Jewish per se.
As for my earlier description of myself as a Jewish Buddhist agnostic, it is an identity that I’ve thought about quite a bit. Living in the South, which is predominantly Christian and perhaps predominantly Baptist, I’ve felt compelled to offer some description of my own spirituality, though it’s been a mainly non-institutional path. As you may know, there are many Buddhists who are also Jewish – so many that the shorthand term is JewBu – with Norman Fischer being an extremely important and inspirational example for me (and Rodger Kamenetz’s book The Jew in the Lotus being similarly crucial). My Buddhist practice amounts to a daily morning meditation (zazen, that is, sitting zen) and some ongoing reading of key Buddhist texts. As you may also know, Buddhism is agnostic with respect to the divine; an engagement with the divine is simply not central to Buddhist practice. My own sense of being agnostic is that while I am mostly and primarily someone who believes in God, that belief also involves periods of substantial doubt and non-belief. We could simply be unlikely accidents. So for me, the best simple label is Jewish Buddhist agnostic, a terminology that provokes some interesting conversations with students and friends here in Tuscaloosa.
As for being eclectic (or negatively capable) vs. lacking principle, I have always been an includer, not an excluder. I have never been good at maintaining the kind of principles or do’s and don’t’s that would keep me in good standing with any group. I’ve been too “spiritual” or “lyrical” to be properly Language-ish, and I’ve maintained too many elements (scattered as they may be throughout the work) of traditional narrative. I’m too philosophically oriented and too insistent on invented forms (what Kathleen Fraser calls the “innovative necessity”) for the mainstream and the creative writing world, and too involved in a simultaneous practice of poetry and critical writing. I live by my principles, do what I do with absolute commitment and integrity, and don’t worry about how the work fits into a particular grouping. I am able to do so, in part, because my livelihood – as you know, I’ve been an administrator for the past twenty years – has had little or nothing to do with my activity as a poet or critic
4. MGP: You partly answer the above question when you remark, in the memoir, “What bothered me about nearly all of the poetry being written within academia was that the model for the poet and the poem involved an unspoken validation of the institutionally sanctioned split between creative and critical faculties.” Your own solution was to write the “Day-Poems.” Can you tell us a little bit more about this sequence. Does it look ahead to “H’s Journal” and your later improvisations?
HL: The “Day-Poems,” written in the late 1970s, were a deliberate attempt to break out of the plain-spoken, anecdotal, epiphanic mode of writing that I had ingested. Stevens and Ashbery were influences, but I was really looking more directly for ways to bring my reading and thinking in philosophy into the realm of my poetry. I have not looked back at these poems; I am pretty certain they were lousy. But they were necessary in order to clear the way to do something else. In that sense, yes, they look ahead to the writing that becomes the second half of Doublespace, and the series for INTER(IR)RUPTIONS, and the three series in 3 of 10 (including H’s Journal).
One of the few people who read the Day-Poems series was David Ignatow. He and I become good friends in the late 1970s, and he became a crucial correspondent, reader, and friend throughout the 1980s and 1990s. When I first met David – at a poetry festival organized by former students of mine at Virginia – he read and listened to my Day-Poems, and he prescribed that I read George Oppen. It was exactly the right prescription – a medicine that has been crucial to my writing life to this very day.
5. MGP: A major milestone in your evolution as poet and thinker was obviously the watershed conference “What is a Poet?”, which you organized at the University of Alabama in 1984, where you were now teaching. It was at this conference I had the good fortune to be invited and hence come to know you, and only someone with your openness could have invited such an astonishing conglomeration of poets—Louis Simpson, David Ignatow, Denise Levertov, Gerald Stern—and critics—Charles Altieri, Kenneth Burke, Gregory Jay, Helen Vendler, and me. When John Ashbery, who was to fit the “avant-garde” slot, couldn’t come, you invited Charles Bernstein and the rest is history, as many of the participants were enraged by Charles, and you and he began a great friendship that led to your joint-editorship of the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series for the University of Alabama Press as well as many other projects.
Do you think it would be possible to have such an exciting, truly transformative conference in 2013? If not, why not? How has the poetry world changed?
HL: No, I don’t think it would be possible to have such a conference today. The (American) poetry world is seemingly less polarized, less oppositional. I say seemingly because I am suspicious of what may be a merely superficial politeness or seeming openness (by the so-called mainstream or by the creative writing programs) to a greater range of writing. When the 1984 conference took place at Alabama, the divisions were raw and palpable. As you know, faculty from my own department’s creative writing program led students in a walk out during Charlie Altieri’s talk, and at subsequent poetry readings on campus it became customary to begin with a bashing of theory and of language poetry. I personally had little or no presence as a poet on my own campus for many years; I could not give an officially sanctioned reading on campus for fifteen years. Today, students and faculty alike are open and supportive of a broader range of reading and writing. And the students themselves are inviting poets such as Rae Armantrout to campus, and I recently taught a grad seminar where we studied the work of Oppen, Creeley, Taggart, and Eigner, and Taggart visited and gave a reading.
I am, though, suspicious of the story of happy hybridity ruling the land – a time when students and teachers are all open to all forms of experimentation. What’s missing from these instances of trying on different styles of writing is the kind of commitment, context (cultural and historical), and sustained integrity that I think is essential to any mode of writing poetry.
I also think that the mechanisms of power, prizes, reviews, and publication, remain every bit as murky and non-transparent as in 1984 (when Helen Vendler, for example, could deny that her reviews and her favoritism had any influence on a poet’s career). In my opinion, the distribution of awards remains, for the most part, unfair, narrow, and biased (in predictable ways).
6. MGP: In Doublespace, Poems 1971-1989, which I mentioned earlier, the second half of the book contains experiments in language poetry: for example,“Compositions 24: Spur of the Moment Redaction,” which uses a good deal of fragmentation, dislocation, and variation on vocal registers, to create a complex meditation. And yet you didn’t stick with “language poetry” for very long. Why not? What element was missing in the more extreme experiments of the Language poets?
HL: I’m not sure, Marjorie, that it’s really a binary – that I did or did not stick with “language poetry” for very long. The language poets with whom I became friends – Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, Tom Mandel, Rae Armantrout, Susan Howe, Norman Fischer – were, at that time, extremely helpful in showing me a way of approaching poetry that was completely compatible with an ongoing interest in philosophy and critical theory. The formal restlessness of Lyn, Ron, and Charles also proved to be a crucial example for me. So, yes, some aspects of “more extreme experiments of the Language poets” did not remain central to my own practice, but one could make the same argument for their own work as well. Perhaps the more extreme work was a necessary clearing of the ground – both a provocative critique of more mainstream practices and a way for each of these poets to open up ultimately more productive, engaging ways of writing.
In my own writing, it might be said that from about 1985 until late 1994 (with the beginning of what became Days), the more extreme experiments of the language poets did hold sway. Then, my own writing began to embrace elements of lyricism and an exploration of spirituality that, at the time, were outside of the strictures or advocacies of earlier language poetry.
7. MGP: Your next big book was, I believe, 3 of 10 (Chax, 1996). I’ve always considered this a major breakthrough for you. I notice that it is dedicated to Ron Silliman, but its “new sentences” are hardly like his. In “H’s Journal,” for example, your source is evidently Thoreau’s Journal — and the numbered propositions are aphoristic, condensed and oblique. Some of them are citations, like #5, “Like cuttlefish we conceal ourselves, we darken the atmosphere in which we move, we are not transparent.” And there are major nuggets here like #69,“Ethical imperatives and questions probing moral efficacy occult only slightly in the shade of tonal ironizing.”
How would you describe the “turn” from Language poetry to this new kind of writing?
HL: I have always been grateful for your generous review of 3 of 10 in The Virginia Quarterly Review. Even so, we have somewhat different perspectives on that book. I really think of it as still being written under the sign and imperatives of language poetry. Negation, for example, part two of 3 of 10, works from an acrostic (passages from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind – perhaps a precursor technique to what I’m doing now in the Notebooks with the quotation of accompanying readings in philosophy?), but more crucially has the constraint of no pronouns throughout the entire ten poem series. Very language-y, no? H’s Journal is clearly indebted to Ron’s own exploration of the resources of the sentence, as well as his (and your) engagement with Wittgenstein (and the form of numbered propositions). Displayspace is more decidedly hybrid in its methods, though there are highly specific, complex rubrics or axioms at work for the construction of each poem in the ten poem sequence. (Oddly, it’s somewhat similar to the rhythm and formulas used for The New Spirit, with poems 1, 4, 7, and 10 being the longest, most open-ended, and the poems between these being more lyrical and constrained.)
The overall book 3 of 10 is dedicated to my aunt and uncle (Linda and Stan Goodman, your Los Angeles neighbors), my mother, and in memory of my father (who had passed away shortly before the book’s publication). But each sequence in the book is dedicated separately, based on friendship and aesthetic affinities: H’s Journal to Ron Silliman, Negation to Charles Bernstein, and Displayspace to my fellow Alabamian, Jake Berry.
8. MGP: In 1993, you went to China for the first time, giving readings and lectures and beginning an important friendship with Yunte Huang whom you brought to Alabama. How do you feel that Chinese culture and Chinese poetry have influenced your subsequent work? How have your views of China evolved between that time and your recent (2013) trip?
HL: On many levels the initial China trip (in spring of 1993) was deeply formative and instructive. Yunte had already come to the US to study with me at Alabama – an oddly fortuitous outcome as he was being taught at Peking University by a former student of mine, and he had, by chance, read some of my essays. We –James Sherry (poet, publisher of Roof Books, and businessman) – traveled in search of Chinese poets who were, like the language poets, formally innovative (at the level of the character/radical). We had also published a bilingual collection of poetry and essays (by me, James, and Charles Bernstein) as a way of introducing Chinese readers to various elements of language poetry. The interest in poetry in China was absolutely amazing. Our initial book-publishing event (in Chengdu) was attended and covered by 18 newspapers and 3 television stations. And we did find several amazing poets (with Che Qianzi, from my perspective, being the most interesting of all). But I also learned that my own assumptions about the (cultural) meaning of a personally expressive poetry were narrow and bound strictly to a moment in the history of American poetry. In fact, a personally expressive poetry (plain-spoken and epiphanic) in China of 1993 might be viewed as having a 180 degree difference from the same gesture in America. There were also a range of economic shocks to register – apartments in Beijing (government controlled) renting for $3 a month; breakfasts that cost ten cents; etc.
In the intervening twenty years, my own readings of Chinese poetry have principally focused on classical Chinese poetry, and I
have also developed an ongoing reading of a range of Zen Buddhist texts. As everyone has observed, the economic changes in China are absolutely staggering. I was quite moved on the recent trip by many Chinese talking to me about the somewhat terrifying nature of this rapid cultural change, with that discomfort often being expressed to me as a kind of spiritual crisis.
I am surprised, amused, and pleased that the Chinese – poets, scholars, professors – are very interested in my poetry. A bilingual Selected Poems is being completed (for publication in 2014). It is not something that I have sought out or promoted, yet it has happened.
While I remain interested in ongoing experiments in socialism – China, and Cuba (where I’ve been able to travel three times in the past couple of years) – I am less naïve about the ramifications of the state’s control (particularly of means of expression). In China, while the publication of our selection of Language poems and essays was state-sanctioned, some poems were removed from the collection, and we were not sanctioned for distribution (by the one distribution agency in the country). In Cuba, I experienced a very chilling intervention by the government which made it impossible for a colleague and me to perform our jazz-poetry improvisations.
9. MGP: After the Millennium—or is it after 9/11?— your poetry becomes, I think, more spare, intense, and inward—a luminous poetry best represented by The New Spirit (2005). At a time when religion had become unfashionable, here you were, turning your back on the semantics of, say, Steve McCaffery, and writing very open free-wheeling poetry of religious inspiration, partly Jewish but also with Eastern (Buddhist) inflections. What does it mean to write “religious” or“spiritual” poetry when one doesn’t quite believe in any religious truth? How do you avoid a faux-religiosity? Can you comment on the reception of The New Spirit? And what other “spiritual” poets, if any, do you feel close to? Are you a Jewish poet, and if so, how?
HL: Yes, indeed, The New Spirit (written in 1999, and published in 2005) does mark an important turn in my poetry – a turn toward that amorphous term “the spiritual.” In fact, the Hebrew word teshuvah, meaning a turn or a re-turn, is a fundamental, recurring word in The New Spirit. And yes, the particular inflection that I give to that spiritual exploration is that of a Jewish Buddhist agnostic.
In order to answer your questions, I need to reorient our sense of the word “spiritual.” First, I would note a key distinction that I found confirmed in my ongoing reading of Derrida: there’s a big difference between religion and religious. I am not so interested in religion – i.e., the institutions that structure and constrain religious practice and experience. Mine is more a writing – poetry and essays as an overlapping exploration (with my most recent collection of essays being Lyric & Spirit) – in an Emersonian vein. I think of it as a phenomenology of spiritual experience, with all of its inconstant, erratic, momentary nature. The spirituality that matters to me is drawn from a broad range of sources – from nature writing (Thoreau, for example) to jazz (with John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme being pivotal for The New Spirit), from the modern visual arts (Rothko, for example) to contemporary folk or outsider art (Howard Finster, Charlie Lucas, JB Murry), from poetry, to philosophy (Derrida, Heidegger, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty), to science fiction. And yes, from more typically religious domains and activities: zen meditation, the reading of various Buddhist texts (especially Dogen, but also Chinese classical poetry). Or, in thinking about my poetry from The New Spirit to the present, a range of overlapping terms have been at the heart of it: spirit, being, time, perception, consciousness, language. Or, as I’ve been suggesting, spirit can be thought of as a term (in its productive vagueness) that opens up to considerations of the nature of consciousness, of language and its relationship to being, to thinking, to music, to a beyond, and to worlds beyond our five senses.
So for me, a poetry of spirituality is primarily an engagement with the invisible. It is part and parcel of an ongoing thinking and questioning focused on the enigmatic nature of human being. In this sense – particularly with it sense of poems and essays as part of an ongoing conversation with questioning at the heart of the activity – my writing is very much within Jewish interpretive traditions (as beautifully analyzed in Susan Handelman’s The Slayers of Moses).
You ask about the difficulty of writing a spiritual poetry when “one doesn’t quite believe in any religious truth.” I don’t experience so-called religious truths as binary in nature; I would reject the notion that one believes in or does not believe in certain truths. Rather, the writing is the experience of a malleable, ongoing process of engagement with the spiritual. The poems are not conclusions or even fixed affirmations as much as they are portals or occasions for the manifestation of an experience (that is occurring simultaneously with the composition of the poem, as well as in its subsequent re-reading).
It may even be possible to reverse and radically re-place our sense of fundamentalism. Perhaps the writing of The New Spirit can be thought of as a response to some of the fundamentalisms of avant garde poetry of the late 1990s – some of the implicit and explicit do’s and don’t’s that were still operational and that I felt to be overly restrictive. Can one really imagine that poetry would or should abandon consideration of the spiritual?
Generally, the reception of The New Spirit has been quite positive, including the Virginia Quarterly Review awarding me the Balch Prize in Poetry (for the publication of the first section of The New Spirit). However, the initial response, particularly from the core of the experimentalist community in New York, was a bit chilly. I remember one of my first readings of the entirety of The New Spirit as part of the Double Happiness reading series. (The reading took place on March 3, 2001, and is available at my Penn Sound author’s website.) I read with Charles Bernstein, who read first and who, at the time was developing his wonderfully humorous poetry, in a kind of stand-up mode. I followed with The New Spirit, which, at the dinner conversation afterwards, was met with a mystified mostly negative response, including the question of why would you want to write about that? On the other hand, one person who immediately responded very positively was the author Peter Straub who recognized the poem-series as a composition with affinities to an extended jazz suite.
Both the essays in Lyric & Spirit and the poetry from The New Spirit onward have put me in touch with a great many poets exploring similar territory – what I think of as an attempt to write a new spiritual poetry that is not so dependent on a received vocabulary or a received form or formula for the writing. A partial list of those (contemporary) writers would include John Taggart, Peter O’Leary, Lissa Wolsak, Fanny Howe, Elizabeth Robinson, Laynie Browne, Norman Fischer, Paul Naylor, Jake Berry… From an earlier time, of course, Rilke, Blake, Dickinson, Celan, Trakl, Hölderlin, Oppen, Thoreau, Emerson...
10. MGP: For the past decade, you have been producing increasingly interdisciplinary poetry — visual as well as with musical accompaniment. The beautiful handwritten shape-writing poems in your ongoing Notebooks (including N18 (complete) published by Singing Horse Press in 2012) seem to be most congenial to the “real” Hank Lazer. In other words, here, writing daily poems often with great spontaneity, you have found a mode you couldn’t have dreamt of back in your Louis Simpson period or even while writing “language poetry” in the 90s. Can you comment on this most recent development and where you want to go from here?
HL: I think you’re right: the Notebook pages/poems feel like the most congenial space for my writing. The inclusion of quoted material – which is something that I’ve been doing since 1973 (my M.A. thesis at Virginia was a series of poems constructed from Thoreau’s Journal) – allows me to blur the boundary between reading and writing, between poetry and philosophy. The improvisational nature of the Notebook pages – as you know, I do not make any drafts for the pages – engage me in a kind of focused, momentary composition akin to free jazz improvisation and to some approaches to calligraphy. I am now more than 2,000 pages and 26 notebooks into this kind of writing, and, at present, I am uncertain whether I’ve found a final formless form that will remain my way of writing, or whether after notebook 30 I might choose to embark on a different kind of writing project.
The most recent collaborative work involves thinking of various notebook pages as kinds of non-traditional scores or prompts. I’ve been working on performances with soprano saxophone player Andrew Raffo Dewar – he studied with Steve Lacy (who often worked with poems, particularly the work of Creeley, as well as the dao de jing) and plays in Anthony Braxton’s band. We’ve performed our voice/saxophone improvisations in Tuscaloosa, Athens (Georgia), and Havana (Cuba). We have a concert planned for Havana in early 2014.
As for what a next project might look like: my grandparents were all Russian Jews who came to the US in the 1915-1920 period. I have two tape recordings of interviews with my father’s parents. I would like to work with those tapes – their voices (to construct a multi-voice composition), their vocabulary – as material for a new composition. In an odd way, this would be coming full circle, as the first poems I wrote and that are included in Doublespace are poems that record the stories of my grandparents and great aunts, uncles, and cousins.
11. MGP: One could argue that your evolution is best described as Hegelian. Thesis ("normal" lyric), antithesis (language poetry, experimental poetry), synthesis (current "notebook" work which is certainly innovative but also honors classical norms for what makes a text poetic). Do you think this is accurate and can you elaborate? Do you find the same process in other poets or do you think this is somewhat unique?
HL: This is a fascinating suggestion and description, Marjorie. It’s a description that had not occurred to me… As I have been thinking about this analysis, I think it has some validity, but it is also too neat a formula. I’m more of an includer. Elements of my early lyricism and concentrated narratives, for example, still find their way into all of my subsequent writing. I don’t find this same process in other poets. I think that a different way of describing what I’ve been doing is as a kind of ongoing restlessness – a way of perpetually asking and putting into question what a poem might be and how I, as a poet, might proceed. While the form of my writing has undergone rather deliberate and radical shifts – what I think of (to use Kathleen Fraser’s term) as the innovative necessity – there are definitely recurring key words, terms, questions, and points of reference.
Perhaps the underlying model is what intrigued me about the careers of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Bob Dylan, Gertrude Stein, and Pablo Neruda, each of whom went through radically different phases of artistic activity. In that sense, I don’t think that what I’ve been doing is unique, nor do I think that radical shifts in the nature of my writing removes me completely from an ongoing element of self-expression, and perhaps even of a distinctive voice (though I hope it is voices, plural). But the more I think about it, Marjorie, your description of this quasi-Hegelian process really does encompass the essential nature of my writing’s development.
12. MGP: And finally, Hank, a banal question but a necessary one. How do you reconcile teaching and writing poetry? Being an administrator and writing poetry? How do you strike the right balance? And what is your assessment of the current poetry scene as you see it from your perch in Tuscaloosa and on your travels? Is there anything you wish you had done these past decades that you were not able to do? And to turn the question around, what for you is the freedom of the poet in the early 21st Century?
HL: I’ll go through these questions as you’ve presented them… As for teaching and writing: I’ve been a full-time administrator for nearly twenty years, so, my teaching has been sporadic. Typically, one course a year, and for quite a few years I taught an experimental arts course to undergraduates, which may be where some of my ideas for collaborative arts activities developed. When I do teach poetry it is in a graduate seminar (for MFA, MA, and PhD students in English), and the reading that I do for such courses does inform my writing quite directly – both essays and poetry.
The career path that I’ve taken –since 1977 at the University of Alabama; in administration – has been surprising and fortuitous. From the outside, one might assume that working in administration would completely undercut one’s ability to engage in serious reading and writing. In my case, it turned out that the opposite was true. As you well know, most English Departments, mine included, specialize in a kind of emotionally draining polarized in-fighting. Though the administrative workday was longer and steadier, leaving the department as my home base actually gave me more time, and less conflicted time, to read and write. Administrative life, oddly, gave me more independence as a writer, and my fellow administrators, though perhaps not understanding what I was doing as a poet, have always been extremely supportive. It is this administrative support that has allowed me, for example, to travel several times to Cuba and China to develop a range of contacts in poetry and the visual arts. My administrative work allowed me to work closely with the University of Alabama Press – serving on the Board, being the administrative reporting channel for the Press, editing (with Charles Bernstein) the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series, and serving for one year as Acting Director of the Press. And I very much learned to value and treasure the institution-wide view that was essential to my job as Associate Provost for Academic Affairs. The relations with colleges such as Engineering and Business have been invaluable to me, as well as the opportunity to represent the university locally and nationally in arts-centered projects, research, conferences, and discussions.
The intense pace of administrative life has limited my ability for sustained research and writing of some of the more complex, ambitious essays that I hope to complete in the next few years. (As I complete this interview, I’m submitting my retirement letter, which will allow me to leave administrative life while retaining the opportunity to teach and travel on behalf of the university.)
As for an assessment of the current poetry scene, I’d say that I’m rather optimistic. My recent participation in the Poetics Convergence at Bothell gave me a strong sense of many younger writers engaged in original and intriguing projects. And sites such as Penn Sound convince me that poetry’s location will increasingly be a digital one.
As for what I was not able to do: living in Alabama has been a double-edged sword. I have the isolation, time, and financial/job security that allows me to write whatever I want. My professional life –as an administrator –was never yoked to the pace, placement, or evaluation of my work as a poet – a blessing and disconnection that it took me quite a few years to appreciate and understand. There are no barriers between me and the next poem. The down side of my isolation (or literally eccentric location in Alabama) is that – and this was much more true in the 1970s and 1980s – it has not always been easy to achieve some visibility or recognition for the work I’ve been doing.
“The freedom of the poet in the early 21st century,” at least in the US, is (perhaps depending upon one’s economic circumstances) to have a rare opportunity to engage in unalienated labor. To engage in a writing life that allows one an intimate experience of what it means to be human, of how our life in language changes, to explore what it is like to have consciousness now. What a sweet thing: to do something that we love, to meet interesting people with a similar passion, to travel so that we can share this experience, to have such conversations…
An Interview with Hank Lazer
1.MGP: Hank, in your memoir for Contemporary Authors, you give a wonderful account of a happy “normal” childhood in San Jose, and then an equally happy high school period, what with your 4.0 average and becoming valedictorian. It’s an unlikely background for a poet, and you even say that both in high school and at Stanford, you “struggled a bit with English.” Why do you think that was the case and how did you ever discover your vocation for poetry?
HL: I really don’t think of my childhood as “happy” or “normal,” though perhaps every childhood has its mixture of happiness and unhappiness and is, in its particularity, not exactly “normal.” My social world consisted almost entirely of a set of family relations – grandparents (Russians Jews who came to the US in the 1915-1920 period, and who, for most of my life, lived within walking distance of our house), my great aunt and uncle (lived next door to us, and their youngest son, Ben, and I were like brothers). Sort of a California version of the shtetl. I did well in school, but it was not an especially happy place for me. I played sports (mainly basketball and golf), but I had skipped a grade in school and my growth spurt was late, so, at the start of my junior year in high school I was 5’6” and 99 lbs. (I’m now 6’ and 190 lbs.) I was the class valedictorian with a 4.0 (in an era when that was a rarity), but such accomplishments felt like the norm among the few Jewish families – my parents’ duplicate bridge group, for example – scattered throughout San Jose. There were fewer than 10 Jews in my high school; the one temple drew from entire county. In high school, I excelled in math, not English. I think that boys mature more slowly, and the emotional and psychological nuances (or basics!) required for understanding literature were not part of my makeup, thus the ability to read and engage deeply with literature developed later in my life. I was, though, always a reader. I can remember the summer (1965) I spent in Berkeley attending a National Science Foundation summer math program for high school students; I neglected my math studies for reading (and haunting the wonderful used book stores), playing ping pong with the international students at International House where I was living, attending folk music concerts (I met Mississippi Fred McDowell), and taking part in political demonstrations.
The more intense turn to poetry began when my cousin Ben introduced me to the work of Allen Ginsberg. This would have been in 1965 or 1966, and I can remember reading Howl and thinking this was very different than what we were reading and analyzing in our high school classes. I began Stanford in 1967, and my early classes focused on math and the sciences, and I thought I would be pre-med. In the fall of my sophomore year, I took a course from Al Gelpi – an Early American Literature class – and he required us to attend a poetry reading. The readers – and this was my first poetry reading – were Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov. Quite a beginning! I can still remember how mesmerizing it was to hear Duncan read “Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar,” – to watch him move his right hand as he seemed to conduct the reading of the poem.
In college, too, I was somewhat of a loner, and I never really plugged into any poetry writing scene per se. I suppose that the choice to pursue literary studies and to become a poet appealed to me as something that no one else in my family had done. We had doctors and lawyers, a theoretical physicist, and so forth, but no poets. And unlike the extraordinarily finite nature of accomplishment in the sciences, in a perverse way I was drawn to the vexing indefiniteness of accomplishment in poetry. I remember reading a Paris Review interview with T. S. Eliot, and he told the interviewer that truly he did not know if he had written a good poem. That sort of relationship – or non-relationship, the opposite of the grade point average and test score mentality? – to accomplishment or excellence intrigued me.
At Stanford, in my senior year I developed a strong interest in the work of Gaston Bachelard and wrote a rather theoretical paper that pointed toward a phenomenology of reading. In our senior honors seminar we were reading C. S. Lewis’ An Experiment in Criticism – remember, this was prior to the influx of French theory into English departments. Along with a few other students, I developed a literary magazine, Glosses, that published critical writing. (The magazine had a life of only one or two issues.) I wrote my honors thesis on Blake’s early poetry. But in the spring of 1971, I traveled around in Europe, beginning in England, and I immediately knew that when I returned to the US for grad school that I would be focusing on American (not British) literature.
I would also add that during these early years, when I was first turning to poetry with some intensity, I also was developing a strong interest in jazz and in the blues, interests that continue to this day and that /have had a deep influence on my writing.
2. MGP: At Virginia, where you received your PhD, you studied Lowell, Plath, Berryman, etc. with Alan Williamson. I can certainly see Lowell’s influence in a poem like “1616 Hester Avenue,” included in Doublespace. And “Elegy for my Grandfather, Charles Goodman” reminds me a bit of the Winslow Elegies which I love. Can you say something about this early Lowell strain? Do you read much Robert Lowell now?
HL: My first semester in graduate school at Virginia, Fall 1971, I took a Contemporary American Poetry survey course from Alan Williamson. We used the Poulin anthology (then in its first edition), and we spent nearly half of the semester reading Lowell (as Alan had studied with Lowell at Harvard and was a sort of Lowell protégé). But I never really bought in to the Lowell celebration. I came to poetry, and to Virginia, from a Bay Area ethos – with the assumption that poetry was an act of mental health, not a celebration of psychological distress. The last day of our last class on Lowell, Alan peered over his briefcase and asked us what we thought of Lowell. I immediately raised my hand and said that I thought he was vastly over-rated and that we had spent far too much of the semester reading his work.
Alan did introduce me to many other poets whose work I continue to read, most especially Rilke. His teaching of Plath’s work was superb. Lowell, late in his life, visited Virginia and gave an excellent and very moving retrospective reading. I was most drawn to his late work.
And Alan was not the only poetry teacher at UVa. One year, fresh from the publication of his Yale prize book Field Guide, Robert Hass was in residence. Diane Wakoski taught as a visiting poet, and she introduced us to the American Poetry Review (the very first issue, with David Ignatow on the cover), to the work of Jerome Rothenberg, Clayton Eshleman, and David Antin, among others. And eventually Alan left and was replaced by Gregory Orr, whose interest in a wide-range of European poets and painters proved very helpful to me.
So, as we say in the South, Lowell never “floated my boat,” and I do not read Lowell today.
3. MGP: In these Virginia years, you evidently discovered Heidegger and also such poets from the anti-Lowell camp as Jerome Rothenberg and Clayton Eshleman. How did you then—and how do you now—justify your particular form of eclecticism? On the one hand, you were participating, from Stanford on, in left-wing political action; on the other, you were reading Heidegger. Did the latter’s anti-Semitism not bother you? And where did you stand in the ongoing controversy between New American Poets and the more Establishment contingent? Is bridging the gap between such groups a form of negative capability or is it, as some might charge, a lack of firm principle, aesthetic or philosophical?
HL: The Lowell camp, as I noted above, never held much interest for me, with the possible exception of Sylvia Plath’s poetry and John Berryman’s first Dream Songs. I was more of a partisan for deep image poetry and related writings: James Wright, Galway Kinnell, early work by W. S. Merwin. Through the work of Robert Bly, particularly his work as a translator and editor, I read a great deal of European and South American poetry: Neruda, Lorca, Vallejo, Trakl, Tranströmer, and others. At Virginia, I resumed my study of Spanish, and I did quite a bit of translation (particularly of Neruda and Alfonsina Storni). I also took a graduate seminar in the work of Kierkegaard.
As for the anthology wars, during my grad school time at Virginia, I was rather ignorant of that polarity. I knew that I had plenty of reading to do – a sense that I needed to catch up – and I read widely in twentieth-century poetry, mostly on my own. (I have always been an extremely stubborn, independent student.) Eventually, I became a devoted reader of Louis Simpson’s work – that compressed, anecdotal, Chekhovian mode of poetic composition became an important model for me.
Probably the most important part of my academic studies at Virginia had to do with nineteenth-century American Literature, particularly the American Renaissance. I did lots of reading of Thoreau, Emerson, Melville (all the novels), Hawthorne, Whitman, and Poe (literally everything he wrote). Much of my teaching at Alabama focused on 19th-century American literature. My favorite seminar that I taught at Alabama was on Thoreau, Cage, Dickinson, and Susan Howe.
My reading of Heidegger began at Virginia, on my own. I remember that a section of Poetry, Language, Thought appeared in an early issue of The American Poetry Review. I bought the book and loved it. I was especially moved by Heidegger’s sense of poetry as an essential thinking and the poet (with Rilke as the primary example) as one who, in language, explores and dares the ad-venture in being. Heidegger’s linkage of language and being – their inextricable mutuality – fascinated me, and ultimately sketched out a direction (eventually) for my poetry and essay-writing. I continued to read whatever of Heidegger’s work (with the exception of Being and Time) was available in translation. As for Being and Time, in the 1970s I felt unprepared to read that big book (due to the fact that I had little background in the history of philosophy) and delayed reading it until I began the Notebooks in 2006.
Did Heidegger’s anti-Semitism bother me? No. I was not reading Heidegger biographically; I was unaware of his anti-Semitism; I was reading him for what he had to say about language and being and for his insights into the work of Hölderlin, Trakl, and Rilke. Later, years later, learning of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, yes, it bothered me. But I still would and do read him, and I read a great deal of Levinas, who, as you know, was Heidegger’s colleague and friend. The identity politics litmus tests that are now so prevalent in literary evaluations were not so prominent in the mid-1970s. In retrospect, Naziism is clearly present in Heidegger’s writing -- I see it in the totalizing tendencies throughout his work. My reading (several years ago, as part of the Notebooks project) of Levinas' Totality and Infinity was most clarifying with respect to the authoritarian implications of Heidegger’s tendency to totalize -- to gather disparate elements under a single authority. Ultimately, I come down on Levinas’ side of this important difference, siding with infinity (or small b being) rather than totality (or large B Being). That valuing of particulars is, I think, ethical in nature, but also has implications for one’s poetics – bearing affinities to Objectivism, to Buddhist thinking, to the work of someone like Eigner or Oppen (as in “Of Being Numerous”).
Today, and along the way, I have thought with some amusement about my “bad” identity politics in terms of the writers whose work has mattered so much to me over the years. I am definitely a Jewish Buddhist agnostic (from California, and now a Southerner, since 1971), yet many of the most important writers to me have been New England WASPS such as Thoreau and Creeley. Or, as you point out, the anti-Semitic Heidegger. Like any writer, I am drawn toward work that excites me and that is of immediate use. As Taggart puts it, one “proceeds from need.… One goes, searches where one must to find the right materials and tools for the job at hand” (“A Preface,” in Songs of Degrees, p. 71). And of course there is a long list of Jewish poets/writers whose work has become deeply important to me – Jabes, Levinas, Celan, Oppen, Norman Fischer, Rachel Back, Jacques Derrida, Larry Eigner, Tom Mandel, Rodger Kamenetz, and so on… And I am equally drawn to a range of poets –John Taggart, Lissa Wolsak, Robert Duncan, Paul Naylor, Ronald Johnson, Peter O’Leary – whose spiritually-oriented work is not Jewish per se.
As for my earlier description of myself as a Jewish Buddhist agnostic, it is an identity that I’ve thought about quite a bit. Living in the South, which is predominantly Christian and perhaps predominantly Baptist, I’ve felt compelled to offer some description of my own spirituality, though it’s been a mainly non-institutional path. As you may know, there are many Buddhists who are also Jewish – so many that the shorthand term is JewBu – with Norman Fischer being an extremely important and inspirational example for me (and Rodger Kamenetz’s book The Jew in the Lotus being similarly crucial). My Buddhist practice amounts to a daily morning meditation (zazen, that is, sitting zen) and some ongoing reading of key Buddhist texts. As you may also know, Buddhism is agnostic with respect to the divine; an engagement with the divine is simply not central to Buddhist practice. My own sense of being agnostic is that while I am mostly and primarily someone who believes in God, that belief also involves periods of substantial doubt and non-belief. We could simply be unlikely accidents. So for me, the best simple label is Jewish Buddhist agnostic, a terminology that provokes some interesting conversations with students and friends here in Tuscaloosa.
As for being eclectic (or negatively capable) vs. lacking principle, I have always been an includer, not an excluder. I have never been good at maintaining the kind of principles or do’s and don’t’s that would keep me in good standing with any group. I’ve been too “spiritual” or “lyrical” to be properly Language-ish, and I’ve maintained too many elements (scattered as they may be throughout the work) of traditional narrative. I’m too philosophically oriented and too insistent on invented forms (what Kathleen Fraser calls the “innovative necessity”) for the mainstream and the creative writing world, and too involved in a simultaneous practice of poetry and critical writing. I live by my principles, do what I do with absolute commitment and integrity, and don’t worry about how the work fits into a particular grouping. I am able to do so, in part, because my livelihood – as you know, I’ve been an administrator for the past twenty years – has had little or nothing to do with my activity as a poet or critic
4. MGP: You partly answer the above question when you remark, in the memoir, “What bothered me about nearly all of the poetry being written within academia was that the model for the poet and the poem involved an unspoken validation of the institutionally sanctioned split between creative and critical faculties.” Your own solution was to write the “Day-Poems.” Can you tell us a little bit more about this sequence. Does it look ahead to “H’s Journal” and your later improvisations?
HL: The “Day-Poems,” written in the late 1970s, were a deliberate attempt to break out of the plain-spoken, anecdotal, epiphanic mode of writing that I had ingested. Stevens and Ashbery were influences, but I was really looking more directly for ways to bring my reading and thinking in philosophy into the realm of my poetry. I have not looked back at these poems; I am pretty certain they were lousy. But they were necessary in order to clear the way to do something else. In that sense, yes, they look ahead to the writing that becomes the second half of Doublespace, and the series for INTER(IR)RUPTIONS, and the three series in 3 of 10 (including H’s Journal).
One of the few people who read the Day-Poems series was David Ignatow. He and I become good friends in the late 1970s, and he became a crucial correspondent, reader, and friend throughout the 1980s and 1990s. When I first met David – at a poetry festival organized by former students of mine at Virginia – he read and listened to my Day-Poems, and he prescribed that I read George Oppen. It was exactly the right prescription – a medicine that has been crucial to my writing life to this very day.
5. MGP: A major milestone in your evolution as poet and thinker was obviously the watershed conference “What is a Poet?”, which you organized at the University of Alabama in 1984, where you were now teaching. It was at this conference I had the good fortune to be invited and hence come to know you, and only someone with your openness could have invited such an astonishing conglomeration of poets—Louis Simpson, David Ignatow, Denise Levertov, Gerald Stern—and critics—Charles Altieri, Kenneth Burke, Gregory Jay, Helen Vendler, and me. When John Ashbery, who was to fit the “avant-garde” slot, couldn’t come, you invited Charles Bernstein and the rest is history, as many of the participants were enraged by Charles, and you and he began a great friendship that led to your joint-editorship of the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series for the University of Alabama Press as well as many other projects.
Do you think it would be possible to have such an exciting, truly transformative conference in 2013? If not, why not? How has the poetry world changed?
HL: No, I don’t think it would be possible to have such a conference today. The (American) poetry world is seemingly less polarized, less oppositional. I say seemingly because I am suspicious of what may be a merely superficial politeness or seeming openness (by the so-called mainstream or by the creative writing programs) to a greater range of writing. When the 1984 conference took place at Alabama, the divisions were raw and palpable. As you know, faculty from my own department’s creative writing program led students in a walk out during Charlie Altieri’s talk, and at subsequent poetry readings on campus it became customary to begin with a bashing of theory and of language poetry. I personally had little or no presence as a poet on my own campus for many years; I could not give an officially sanctioned reading on campus for fifteen years. Today, students and faculty alike are open and supportive of a broader range of reading and writing. And the students themselves are inviting poets such as Rae Armantrout to campus, and I recently taught a grad seminar where we studied the work of Oppen, Creeley, Taggart, and Eigner, and Taggart visited and gave a reading.
I am, though, suspicious of the story of happy hybridity ruling the land – a time when students and teachers are all open to all forms of experimentation. What’s missing from these instances of trying on different styles of writing is the kind of commitment, context (cultural and historical), and sustained integrity that I think is essential to any mode of writing poetry.
I also think that the mechanisms of power, prizes, reviews, and publication, remain every bit as murky and non-transparent as in 1984 (when Helen Vendler, for example, could deny that her reviews and her favoritism had any influence on a poet’s career). In my opinion, the distribution of awards remains, for the most part, unfair, narrow, and biased (in predictable ways).
6. MGP: In Doublespace, Poems 1971-1989, which I mentioned earlier, the second half of the book contains experiments in language poetry: for example,“Compositions 24: Spur of the Moment Redaction,” which uses a good deal of fragmentation, dislocation, and variation on vocal registers, to create a complex meditation. And yet you didn’t stick with “language poetry” for very long. Why not? What element was missing in the more extreme experiments of the Language poets?
HL: I’m not sure, Marjorie, that it’s really a binary – that I did or did not stick with “language poetry” for very long. The language poets with whom I became friends – Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, Charles Bernstein, Tom Mandel, Rae Armantrout, Susan Howe, Norman Fischer – were, at that time, extremely helpful in showing me a way of approaching poetry that was completely compatible with an ongoing interest in philosophy and critical theory. The formal restlessness of Lyn, Ron, and Charles also proved to be a crucial example for me. So, yes, some aspects of “more extreme experiments of the Language poets” did not remain central to my own practice, but one could make the same argument for their own work as well. Perhaps the more extreme work was a necessary clearing of the ground – both a provocative critique of more mainstream practices and a way for each of these poets to open up ultimately more productive, engaging ways of writing.
In my own writing, it might be said that from about 1985 until late 1994 (with the beginning of what became Days), the more extreme experiments of the language poets did hold sway. Then, my own writing began to embrace elements of lyricism and an exploration of spirituality that, at the time, were outside of the strictures or advocacies of earlier language poetry.
7. MGP: Your next big book was, I believe, 3 of 10 (Chax, 1996). I’ve always considered this a major breakthrough for you. I notice that it is dedicated to Ron Silliman, but its “new sentences” are hardly like his. In “H’s Journal,” for example, your source is evidently Thoreau’s Journal — and the numbered propositions are aphoristic, condensed and oblique. Some of them are citations, like #5, “Like cuttlefish we conceal ourselves, we darken the atmosphere in which we move, we are not transparent.” And there are major nuggets here like #69,“Ethical imperatives and questions probing moral efficacy occult only slightly in the shade of tonal ironizing.”
How would you describe the “turn” from Language poetry to this new kind of writing?
HL: I have always been grateful for your generous review of 3 of 10 in The Virginia Quarterly Review. Even so, we have somewhat different perspectives on that book. I really think of it as still being written under the sign and imperatives of language poetry. Negation, for example, part two of 3 of 10, works from an acrostic (passages from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind – perhaps a precursor technique to what I’m doing now in the Notebooks with the quotation of accompanying readings in philosophy?), but more crucially has the constraint of no pronouns throughout the entire ten poem series. Very language-y, no? H’s Journal is clearly indebted to Ron’s own exploration of the resources of the sentence, as well as his (and your) engagement with Wittgenstein (and the form of numbered propositions). Displayspace is more decidedly hybrid in its methods, though there are highly specific, complex rubrics or axioms at work for the construction of each poem in the ten poem sequence. (Oddly, it’s somewhat similar to the rhythm and formulas used for The New Spirit, with poems 1, 4, 7, and 10 being the longest, most open-ended, and the poems between these being more lyrical and constrained.)
The overall book 3 of 10 is dedicated to my aunt and uncle (Linda and Stan Goodman, your Los Angeles neighbors), my mother, and in memory of my father (who had passed away shortly before the book’s publication). But each sequence in the book is dedicated separately, based on friendship and aesthetic affinities: H’s Journal to Ron Silliman, Negation to Charles Bernstein, and Displayspace to my fellow Alabamian, Jake Berry.
8. MGP: In 1993, you went to China for the first time, giving readings and lectures and beginning an important friendship with Yunte Huang whom you brought to Alabama. How do you feel that Chinese culture and Chinese poetry have influenced your subsequent work? How have your views of China evolved between that time and your recent (2013) trip?
HL: On many levels the initial China trip (in spring of 1993) was deeply formative and instructive. Yunte had already come to the US to study with me at Alabama – an oddly fortuitous outcome as he was being taught at Peking University by a former student of mine, and he had, by chance, read some of my essays. We –James Sherry (poet, publisher of Roof Books, and businessman) – traveled in search of Chinese poets who were, like the language poets, formally innovative (at the level of the character/radical). We had also published a bilingual collection of poetry and essays (by me, James, and Charles Bernstein) as a way of introducing Chinese readers to various elements of language poetry. The interest in poetry in China was absolutely amazing. Our initial book-publishing event (in Chengdu) was attended and covered by 18 newspapers and 3 television stations. And we did find several amazing poets (with Che Qianzi, from my perspective, being the most interesting of all). But I also learned that my own assumptions about the (cultural) meaning of a personally expressive poetry were narrow and bound strictly to a moment in the history of American poetry. In fact, a personally expressive poetry (plain-spoken and epiphanic) in China of 1993 might be viewed as having a 180 degree difference from the same gesture in America. There were also a range of economic shocks to register – apartments in Beijing (government controlled) renting for $3 a month; breakfasts that cost ten cents; etc.
In the intervening twenty years, my own readings of Chinese poetry have principally focused on classical Chinese poetry, and I
have also developed an ongoing reading of a range of Zen Buddhist texts. As everyone has observed, the economic changes in China are absolutely staggering. I was quite moved on the recent trip by many Chinese talking to me about the somewhat terrifying nature of this rapid cultural change, with that discomfort often being expressed to me as a kind of spiritual crisis.
I am surprised, amused, and pleased that the Chinese – poets, scholars, professors – are very interested in my poetry. A bilingual Selected Poems is being completed (for publication in 2014). It is not something that I have sought out or promoted, yet it has happened.
While I remain interested in ongoing experiments in socialism – China, and Cuba (where I’ve been able to travel three times in the past couple of years) – I am less naïve about the ramifications of the state’s control (particularly of means of expression). In China, while the publication of our selection of Language poems and essays was state-sanctioned, some poems were removed from the collection, and we were not sanctioned for distribution (by the one distribution agency in the country). In Cuba, I experienced a very chilling intervention by the government which made it impossible for a colleague and me to perform our jazz-poetry improvisations.
9. MGP: After the Millennium—or is it after 9/11?— your poetry becomes, I think, more spare, intense, and inward—a luminous poetry best represented by The New Spirit (2005). At a time when religion had become unfashionable, here you were, turning your back on the semantics of, say, Steve McCaffery, and writing very open free-wheeling poetry of religious inspiration, partly Jewish but also with Eastern (Buddhist) inflections. What does it mean to write “religious” or“spiritual” poetry when one doesn’t quite believe in any religious truth? How do you avoid a faux-religiosity? Can you comment on the reception of The New Spirit? And what other “spiritual” poets, if any, do you feel close to? Are you a Jewish poet, and if so, how?
HL: Yes, indeed, The New Spirit (written in 1999, and published in 2005) does mark an important turn in my poetry – a turn toward that amorphous term “the spiritual.” In fact, the Hebrew word teshuvah, meaning a turn or a re-turn, is a fundamental, recurring word in The New Spirit. And yes, the particular inflection that I give to that spiritual exploration is that of a Jewish Buddhist agnostic.
In order to answer your questions, I need to reorient our sense of the word “spiritual.” First, I would note a key distinction that I found confirmed in my ongoing reading of Derrida: there’s a big difference between religion and religious. I am not so interested in religion – i.e., the institutions that structure and constrain religious practice and experience. Mine is more a writing – poetry and essays as an overlapping exploration (with my most recent collection of essays being Lyric & Spirit) – in an Emersonian vein. I think of it as a phenomenology of spiritual experience, with all of its inconstant, erratic, momentary nature. The spirituality that matters to me is drawn from a broad range of sources – from nature writing (Thoreau, for example) to jazz (with John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme being pivotal for The New Spirit), from the modern visual arts (Rothko, for example) to contemporary folk or outsider art (Howard Finster, Charlie Lucas, JB Murry), from poetry, to philosophy (Derrida, Heidegger, Levinas, Merleau-Ponty), to science fiction. And yes, from more typically religious domains and activities: zen meditation, the reading of various Buddhist texts (especially Dogen, but also Chinese classical poetry). Or, in thinking about my poetry from The New Spirit to the present, a range of overlapping terms have been at the heart of it: spirit, being, time, perception, consciousness, language. Or, as I’ve been suggesting, spirit can be thought of as a term (in its productive vagueness) that opens up to considerations of the nature of consciousness, of language and its relationship to being, to thinking, to music, to a beyond, and to worlds beyond our five senses.
So for me, a poetry of spirituality is primarily an engagement with the invisible. It is part and parcel of an ongoing thinking and questioning focused on the enigmatic nature of human being. In this sense – particularly with it sense of poems and essays as part of an ongoing conversation with questioning at the heart of the activity – my writing is very much within Jewish interpretive traditions (as beautifully analyzed in Susan Handelman’s The Slayers of Moses).
You ask about the difficulty of writing a spiritual poetry when “one doesn’t quite believe in any religious truth.” I don’t experience so-called religious truths as binary in nature; I would reject the notion that one believes in or does not believe in certain truths. Rather, the writing is the experience of a malleable, ongoing process of engagement with the spiritual. The poems are not conclusions or even fixed affirmations as much as they are portals or occasions for the manifestation of an experience (that is occurring simultaneously with the composition of the poem, as well as in its subsequent re-reading).
It may even be possible to reverse and radically re-place our sense of fundamentalism. Perhaps the writing of The New Spirit can be thought of as a response to some of the fundamentalisms of avant garde poetry of the late 1990s – some of the implicit and explicit do’s and don’t’s that were still operational and that I felt to be overly restrictive. Can one really imagine that poetry would or should abandon consideration of the spiritual?
Generally, the reception of The New Spirit has been quite positive, including the Virginia Quarterly Review awarding me the Balch Prize in Poetry (for the publication of the first section of The New Spirit). However, the initial response, particularly from the core of the experimentalist community in New York, was a bit chilly. I remember one of my first readings of the entirety of The New Spirit as part of the Double Happiness reading series. (The reading took place on March 3, 2001, and is available at my Penn Sound author’s website.) I read with Charles Bernstein, who read first and who, at the time was developing his wonderfully humorous poetry, in a kind of stand-up mode. I followed with The New Spirit, which, at the dinner conversation afterwards, was met with a mystified mostly negative response, including the question of why would you want to write about that? On the other hand, one person who immediately responded very positively was the author Peter Straub who recognized the poem-series as a composition with affinities to an extended jazz suite.
Both the essays in Lyric & Spirit and the poetry from The New Spirit onward have put me in touch with a great many poets exploring similar territory – what I think of as an attempt to write a new spiritual poetry that is not so dependent on a received vocabulary or a received form or formula for the writing. A partial list of those (contemporary) writers would include John Taggart, Peter O’Leary, Lissa Wolsak, Fanny Howe, Elizabeth Robinson, Laynie Browne, Norman Fischer, Paul Naylor, Jake Berry… From an earlier time, of course, Rilke, Blake, Dickinson, Celan, Trakl, Hölderlin, Oppen, Thoreau, Emerson...
10. MGP: For the past decade, you have been producing increasingly interdisciplinary poetry — visual as well as with musical accompaniment. The beautiful handwritten shape-writing poems in your ongoing Notebooks (including N18 (complete) published by Singing Horse Press in 2012) seem to be most congenial to the “real” Hank Lazer. In other words, here, writing daily poems often with great spontaneity, you have found a mode you couldn’t have dreamt of back in your Louis Simpson period or even while writing “language poetry” in the 90s. Can you comment on this most recent development and where you want to go from here?
HL: I think you’re right: the Notebook pages/poems feel like the most congenial space for my writing. The inclusion of quoted material – which is something that I’ve been doing since 1973 (my M.A. thesis at Virginia was a series of poems constructed from Thoreau’s Journal) – allows me to blur the boundary between reading and writing, between poetry and philosophy. The improvisational nature of the Notebook pages – as you know, I do not make any drafts for the pages – engage me in a kind of focused, momentary composition akin to free jazz improvisation and to some approaches to calligraphy. I am now more than 2,000 pages and 26 notebooks into this kind of writing, and, at present, I am uncertain whether I’ve found a final formless form that will remain my way of writing, or whether after notebook 30 I might choose to embark on a different kind of writing project.
The most recent collaborative work involves thinking of various notebook pages as kinds of non-traditional scores or prompts. I’ve been working on performances with soprano saxophone player Andrew Raffo Dewar – he studied with Steve Lacy (who often worked with poems, particularly the work of Creeley, as well as the dao de jing) and plays in Anthony Braxton’s band. We’ve performed our voice/saxophone improvisations in Tuscaloosa, Athens (Georgia), and Havana (Cuba). We have a concert planned for Havana in early 2014.
As for what a next project might look like: my grandparents were all Russian Jews who came to the US in the 1915-1920 period. I have two tape recordings of interviews with my father’s parents. I would like to work with those tapes – their voices (to construct a multi-voice composition), their vocabulary – as material for a new composition. In an odd way, this would be coming full circle, as the first poems I wrote and that are included in Doublespace are poems that record the stories of my grandparents and great aunts, uncles, and cousins.
11. MGP: One could argue that your evolution is best described as Hegelian. Thesis ("normal" lyric), antithesis (language poetry, experimental poetry), synthesis (current "notebook" work which is certainly innovative but also honors classical norms for what makes a text poetic). Do you think this is accurate and can you elaborate? Do you find the same process in other poets or do you think this is somewhat unique?
HL: This is a fascinating suggestion and description, Marjorie. It’s a description that had not occurred to me… As I have been thinking about this analysis, I think it has some validity, but it is also too neat a formula. I’m more of an includer. Elements of my early lyricism and concentrated narratives, for example, still find their way into all of my subsequent writing. I don’t find this same process in other poets. I think that a different way of describing what I’ve been doing is as a kind of ongoing restlessness – a way of perpetually asking and putting into question what a poem might be and how I, as a poet, might proceed. While the form of my writing has undergone rather deliberate and radical shifts – what I think of (to use Kathleen Fraser’s term) as the innovative necessity – there are definitely recurring key words, terms, questions, and points of reference.
Perhaps the underlying model is what intrigued me about the careers of artists such as Pablo Picasso, Bob Dylan, Gertrude Stein, and Pablo Neruda, each of whom went through radically different phases of artistic activity. In that sense, I don’t think that what I’ve been doing is unique, nor do I think that radical shifts in the nature of my writing removes me completely from an ongoing element of self-expression, and perhaps even of a distinctive voice (though I hope it is voices, plural). But the more I think about it, Marjorie, your description of this quasi-Hegelian process really does encompass the essential nature of my writing’s development.
12. MGP: And finally, Hank, a banal question but a necessary one. How do you reconcile teaching and writing poetry? Being an administrator and writing poetry? How do you strike the right balance? And what is your assessment of the current poetry scene as you see it from your perch in Tuscaloosa and on your travels? Is there anything you wish you had done these past decades that you were not able to do? And to turn the question around, what for you is the freedom of the poet in the early 21st Century?
HL: I’ll go through these questions as you’ve presented them… As for teaching and writing: I’ve been a full-time administrator for nearly twenty years, so, my teaching has been sporadic. Typically, one course a year, and for quite a few years I taught an experimental arts course to undergraduates, which may be where some of my ideas for collaborative arts activities developed. When I do teach poetry it is in a graduate seminar (for MFA, MA, and PhD students in English), and the reading that I do for such courses does inform my writing quite directly – both essays and poetry.
The career path that I’ve taken –since 1977 at the University of Alabama; in administration – has been surprising and fortuitous. From the outside, one might assume that working in administration would completely undercut one’s ability to engage in serious reading and writing. In my case, it turned out that the opposite was true. As you well know, most English Departments, mine included, specialize in a kind of emotionally draining polarized in-fighting. Though the administrative workday was longer and steadier, leaving the department as my home base actually gave me more time, and less conflicted time, to read and write. Administrative life, oddly, gave me more independence as a writer, and my fellow administrators, though perhaps not understanding what I was doing as a poet, have always been extremely supportive. It is this administrative support that has allowed me, for example, to travel several times to Cuba and China to develop a range of contacts in poetry and the visual arts. My administrative work allowed me to work closely with the University of Alabama Press – serving on the Board, being the administrative reporting channel for the Press, editing (with Charles Bernstein) the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series, and serving for one year as Acting Director of the Press. And I very much learned to value and treasure the institution-wide view that was essential to my job as Associate Provost for Academic Affairs. The relations with colleges such as Engineering and Business have been invaluable to me, as well as the opportunity to represent the university locally and nationally in arts-centered projects, research, conferences, and discussions.
The intense pace of administrative life has limited my ability for sustained research and writing of some of the more complex, ambitious essays that I hope to complete in the next few years. (As I complete this interview, I’m submitting my retirement letter, which will allow me to leave administrative life while retaining the opportunity to teach and travel on behalf of the university.)
As for an assessment of the current poetry scene, I’d say that I’m rather optimistic. My recent participation in the Poetics Convergence at Bothell gave me a strong sense of many younger writers engaged in original and intriguing projects. And sites such as Penn Sound convince me that poetry’s location will increasingly be a digital one.
As for what I was not able to do: living in Alabama has been a double-edged sword. I have the isolation, time, and financial/job security that allows me to write whatever I want. My professional life –as an administrator –was never yoked to the pace, placement, or evaluation of my work as a poet – a blessing and disconnection that it took me quite a few years to appreciate and understand. There are no barriers between me and the next poem. The down side of my isolation (or literally eccentric location in Alabama) is that – and this was much more true in the 1970s and 1980s – it has not always been easy to achieve some visibility or recognition for the work I’ve been doing.
“The freedom of the poet in the early 21st century,” at least in the US, is (perhaps depending upon one’s economic circumstances) to have a rare opportunity to engage in unalienated labor. To engage in a writing life that allows one an intimate experience of what it means to be human, of how our life in language changes, to explore what it is like to have consciousness now. What a sweet thing: to do something that we love, to meet interesting people with a similar passion, to travel so that we can share this experience, to have such conversations…