Poetry Brings UA’s Lazer to China

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — The Bible says the prophet is not honored in his own country; The University of Alabama’s Hank Lazer could say the same thing is true about poets.

Lazer, the associate provost for academic affairs and executive director of Creative Campus at UA, recently returned from Wuhan, China, where he was the keynote speaker at the 2nd Convention of Chinese/American Association for Poetry and Poetics & International Symposium on Modern and Contemporary Literatures in English.

“There is a lot of interest in my work over there,” Lazer said. “I think I may have more readers in China than I do in the United States.”

Lazer is one of the leading American authors of experimental poetry. He’s currently working on a series of poetic notebooks, with each book looking and feeling different from the other. The poems, which Lazer refers to as shape-writing, are written in abstract and unique shapes, evoking feeling simply through the design and feel of the words on the page.

Writing, for Lazer, is a nearly mystical act.

“It’s an alert channeling of everything I know,” he said.

While in China, Lazer was able to visit Taizhou and participate in that city’s seminar on modern American poetry and poetics. He met with Chinese poet Ke Jianjun.

“We were able to start out with a deep sense of commonality,” Lazer said. “Our outlook on poetry is very similar, and we established a really intense bond.”

This was Lazer’s second visit to China. The first trip came in 1993, the year after he had published his first book of experimental poetry.

“It was eye-opening to see how seriously poetry was taken there,” he said. At one speaking engagement, there were representatives from 18 newspapers, three television stations and several universities.

“It’s just a different sense there as to the cultural importance of poetry,” Lazer said. “There is a different kind of commitment to the development of experimental poetry.”