UA’s New College to Present Poets Lazer and Rothenberg

Tuscaloosa, Ala. – The University of Alabama’s New College will host poets Dr. Hank Lazer and Dr. Jerome Rothenberg for a reading from their latest work and a book signing at the Gorgas Library at 4 p.m. on April 8 on campus.

This reading is the second in a series of three guest speaker events presented by New College for the spring semester.

Lazer is a professor of English at UA where he has taught since 1977. He currently serves as assistant vice president for undergraduate programs and services.

Lazer is a noted critic of modern and contemporary poetry and is a founding member of The Alabama Poetry Ensemble. For the past 30 years, he has published poetry in many of America’s leading literary magazines and journals.

In 1992, he published “Doublespace: Poems 1971-1989,” a 192-page collection of poems written in several deliberately conflicting styles. This book, which received considerable attention, is unique in American poetry and enacts essential conflicts within current American literary culture.

For the past several years, Lazer has also presented a variety of performance pieces. He has participated in several collaborative performances, including “Garden Works,” a one-month installation and performance with a group of seven artists in Birmingham, Alabama. In 1996, along with dancer-choreographer Cornelius Carter, Lazer co-choreographed “Cantus in Memory,” a dance piece for eight dancers. More recently, he participated in a one-hour cable television reading/performance, and has performed poems from his “Days” series with Alabama musician/poets Jake Berry and Wayne Sides.

Rothenberg, professor at the University of California at San Diego, has been a poet for almost 50 years. He is the author of over 70 books of poetry including “Poems for the Game of Silence,” “Poland/1931,” “A Seneca Journal,” “Vienna Blood,” “That Dada Strain,” “New Selected Poems 1970-1985,” “Khurbn,” and most recently, “A Paradise of Poets” and “A Book of Witness.”

Describing his poetry career as “an ongoing attempt to reinterpret the poetic past from the point of view of the present,” he has also edited seven major assemblages of traditional and contemporary poetry. He has also been involved, since the late 1950s, with various aspects of poetry performance, including two radio sound plays written and performed for Westdeuttscher Rundfunk in Cologne, Germany.

His own selected poetry, “Poems for the Game of Silence,” has appeared in French, Swedish and Flemish editions, and his work has been translated extensively into 12 different languages.

He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974, a National Endowment for the Arts grant in 1976, and was a University of California Regents Professor in 1971. As a visiting research professor with the Center for Twentieth-Century Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, he helped to organize the first international symposium on “Ethnopoetics” in 1975.

New College was established at UA in 1970 to provide an opportunity for highly motivated undergraduates to have greater flexibility in forming a curriculum leading to a bachelor of science or bachelor of arts degree. For more information on New College visit www.as.ua.edu/nc/ or call 205/348-4600.

The College of Arts and Sciences is the University’s largest division and the largest public liberal arts college in the state with 6,600 students and 360 faculty. Students from the college have won numerous national awards including Rhodes Scholarships, Goldwater Scholarships, and memberships on the “USA Today” Academic All American Team.