UA Associate Provost Explores Poetry, Spirituality Through Book of Essays and Web-Based Chapbook

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. –

Fifty-four words, each

six stanzas, 18

lines total. Notes.

 

Essays. Experiments. Spirituality.

Publish: print, online.

“throttle chortle chicago”

That’s what Dr. Hank Lazer’s been up to lately. Lazer, The University of Alabama’s associate provost for academic affairs who supervises the Creative Campus Initiative, recently published an online chapbook, “First Portions,” collecting a series of poems written in an experimental form. He’s also published “Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays, 1996-2008,” which compiles works written over the course of 12 years and cover topics including experimental writing and new expressions of spirituality in contemporary culture.

Both efforts tie together Lazer’s search for new ways of expressing new ways humans have of thinking about themselves and the universe. These new ways find expression in what’s often called “experimental writing.”

“Our experience of life on this Earth now is different than it was 100 years ago,” said Lazer, who has taught at UA since 1977. “The dominant modes of writing tend to be sentimental and formulaic in nature. The dominant form of poetry remains a relatively short poem recording a personal experience, and there’s a little epiphany in a single voice. It seems to me that was probably disappearing as a dominant form of reality by the late 19th century. It strikes me as absurd that we should limit expression to that way of writing. So it becomes incumbent on us to ask, what other kinds of ways of proceeding are plausible and interesting?”

“First Portions,” published by Ahadada Books, represents one way in which Lazer has sought new ways to express reality. The e-chapbook collects more than two-dozen poems composed of six stanzas of three lines and nine words each. Numbers play significantly in the composition, particularly when it comes to Lazer’s interest in spirituality.

“In Jewish mystical lore, the number 18 is particularly salient, so I have three 18s built into this,” Lazer said.

Among the poems are “Stillness,” “Turn,” “Blank” and “Falls.” Two sample stanzas:

 

witness to how

we make a

new book eating

 

half a muffuletta

& fanning air

friends of this

“In the poems in this chapbook, I invented a 54-word form, and I wrote in it for five years,” Lazer says. “I often invent a particular form and usually work with it for a given number of years. I establish a parameter. It’s a lens or a set of glasses I put on. So the question is what can one know through that mode of seeing and writing?”

In addition to the poems, the book features pages from his notes while he was composing the poems and poem-paintings he collaborated on with artist Pak Nichols. The e-chapbook format is particularly conducive to a multimedia presentation, Lazer says.

“Once I started working in the format and came up with roughly 25 pages of poetry, I realized what I could do in this format much more readily in a print format is work in some color pieces — JPEGs converted to PDFs — and I could also incorporate a sample of handwritten materials very easily,” says Lazer, who has published 14 books of poetry and holds a doctorate from the University of Virginia.. “What comes across as self-indulgent in a print book, in a chapbook is a little more permissible.”

Lazer also enjoys the freedom and the internationalism the Web promotes. He says the impetus for the e-chapbook came from Jesse Glass, an English professor at a university in Japan, with whom he came in contact through a mutual friend. Anybody can download the book at the Web site.

“What I love about it is it helps out students concerned about textbook expenses – this sucker’s free,” Lazer says. “You can view it and not print it or otherwise print it out.”

“Lyric and Spirit” (Omidawn, $19.95) comes to readers through the traditional print method. The book includes essays Lazer has written on the art of experimental poetry as well as reflections on contemporary culture and spirituality and interviews with Lazer.

“The book of essays is something I’m strongly attached to, he said. “It’s the first time I’ve been able to do that in 12 years. It took me two years to see what the organization of the book should be. I spent two summers saying to myself, ‘You’re not going to get away from this summertime without figuring out what it is you’ve been writing the last 10 years,’ and I couldn’t see it. So each time I opted to write more essays.”

Lazer says he takes a fairly traditional, accessible approach in his essays even as he writes about experimental poetry.

“Oftentimes what’s unusual about them is that I’m focusing on works of contemporary experimental writers,” Lazer says. “It’s a different kind of scholarship when you’re working with the living, when the reputation and value have not been decided.”

What Lazer finally did decide was that his essays are probing how the basic structures of poetry need to change to show how humanity itself has changed – particularly in regards to how it perceives reality and the spirit.

“What I discovered, finally, is that what I kept returning to over the span of 12 years is two areas of concern,” Lazer says. “One is this thing we call ‘lyric,’ which to me involves asking what are the new possibilities for music or musicality in poetry? What are the new musics and sounds that we are beginning to find beautiful and are different from the sounds we found beautiful 30 or 40 years ago? And the other issue that’s become an obsession of mine is how may we find new ways of writing new forms of poetry that embody contemporary spiritual experience.”

But what both “Lyric and Spirit” and “First Portions” share is Lazer’s love of language – especially the inventive language Lazer hears from his children or his students or daily life – or, as Lazer writes, “throttle chortle chicago.”

“The richness of American language in particular, it seems to me, is in its Creolized, ever-changing hybrid nature,” Lazer says. “Poetry can be a place to record so many different registers of language and slang – a zillion varieties of slang – those resources matter.”

Upcoming Hank Lazer appearances:

• 7 p.m. Friday, March 7, GreencupBooks, 105 Richard Arrington Jr. Blvd., Birmingham.
• 7:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 11, 125 ten Hoor Hall, UA campus, event featuring Rich Curtis (sound artist), Janeann Dill (filmmaker/animation artist) and Hank Lazer (poet).
• 7 p.m. Thursday, March 13, Smith Recital Hall, Huntingdon College, Montgomery.
• 11 a.m.-noon Friday, March 14, workshop, Huntingdon College, 102 Flowers.
• 7 p.m. Saturday, April 5, Berkeley, Calif.: Poetry Flash at Cody’s Books.