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This selected--the first compilation of essays by Hank Lazer
following his ground-breaking and much revered two-volume Opposing
Poetries--offers twelve years of incisive writing at the
intersection of two of the more contentiously debated topics in
current letters. Drawing on poetic traditions as seemingly
disparate as Language writing and Buddhist poetry, Lazer pursues a
way of reading that is rich in the music and spirit of the word,
attuning readers to the pleasures and range of possibilities for
innovative poetry. In a very accessible writing style, and with
flashes of brilliance, Lazer explores and identifies new approaches
to the lyric and to the writing of spiritual experience in American
poetry of the past one hundred years. In this book of essays,
interviews, reflections, and more, Lazer focuses on two topics
central to the poetry of our time: the changing nature of beauty in
the lyric and the necessity of finding new ways of embodying
spirituality. By bringing a wide range of perspectives to his
readings--from the jazz of Monk and Coltrane to the philosophy of
Heidegger and Derrida--Lazer's essays inspire readers to enter into
a renewed and renewing relationship with poetry.
A book of intense emotional power, Elegies & Vacations marks Hank Lazer's taking the resources of innovative poetry in new directions that are at once elegiac, skeptical, and spiritual. Eleven poems, no two alike, Elegies & Vacations is an ambitious attempt, in the words of Robert Duncan, "to recreate the heart of poetry itself." Linking elegies to extended journal-like meditations, Elegies & Vacations asks "what the day may mean." At the heart of the book is a long poem, "Deathwatch for My Father," which tracks the poet's father's final months, testing out the capacities of innovative poetry in the face of the death of a loved one. The book explores relationships with the dead - from the poet's father, to John Cage, to Kenneth Burke, to George Oppen - while also, through family vacations, projecting forward to ask "to what are we ancestral." The opposed or apposed guiding lights of the book - John Ashbery and George Oppen - like the juxtaposed elegies and vacations, offer divergent modes of verbal and ethical grace. Informed by a Buddhist sensibility, as well as by the relativistic thinking of reform (and mystical) Judaism, Lazer's poems move through varying terrains of form, textuality, and geography, from Suzhou (China) to the Abacos (the Bahamas), from Diamond Head (Oahu) to Orono (Maine), from an extended portrait to a journal, from children's stories to a two-columned composition on the nature of literary history.
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