Opposing Poetries: Part One: Issues and Institutions (Volume 1) (Avant-Garde & Modernism Studies)

Opposing Poetries presents a selection of Hank Lazer's writing on a range of issues in contemporary American poetry. Through a series of recurring cultural, material, and institutional perspectives, Lazer investigates the assumptions and habits that govern conflicting conceptions of contemporary American poetry, while refining, reconsidering, and questioning his own and modern theorists' assertions and claims relating to experimental poetry.Volume One examines the shift in the governing assumptions of contemporary poetic practice. Lazer inspects the key critical works addressing poetries in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the political and aesthetic impact of modern critics, poetry reading programs, and of the publishing industry and libraries on contemporary poetic practice.

Literature & Fiction

Lazer, Hank

Essays & Correspondence

Northwestern University Press

Opposing Poetries presents a selection of Hank Lazer's writing on a range of issues in contemporary American poetry. Through a series of recurring cultural, material, and institutional perspectives, Lazer investigates the assumptions and habits that govern conflicting conceptions of contemporary American poetry, while refining, reconsidering, and questioning his own and modern theorists' assertions and claims relating to experimental poetry. Volume One examines the shift in the governing assumptions of contemporary poetic practice. Lazer inspects the key critical works addressing poetries in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as the political and aesthetic impact of modern critics, poetry reading programs, and of the publishing industry and libraries on contemporary poetic practice.

"What is a Poet? is very revealing in a way that no other book is. It is an important service. I think we all need to know the extent of distrust, the extent of the misunderstandings that are rampant in the poetry world. The book is not only definitive but it will initiate a dialogue that will continue."

What Is a Poet?: Essays from the Eleventh Alabama Symposium on English and American Literature

Poetry

Univ of Alabama Pr

3 of 10

Chax Press

Poetry. Renewing and drawing upon a spiritual legacy in innovative poetry—an American poetic lineage that includes Emerson, Thoreau, and Dickinson, that continues in the writing of Robert Duncan, Ronald Johnson, John Taggart—Hank Lazer explores the possibilities for a newly articulated spiritual poetry. Jerome Rothenberg describes THE NEW SPIRIT as "something like a book-length prayer: a crisis in search of a resolution through language." Harryette Mullen writes that "Lazer returns the soul and its song to their highest aspiration."

The New Spirit

History & Criticism

Singing Horse Press

Poetry. Hank Lazer's N18 (COMPLETE), the eighteenth of twenty handwritten notebook projects, is an extended exploration of the relations between shape and meaning. These handwritten poems enact an improvisational "reading" of Immanuel Levinas's Otherwise Than Being or Beyond Essence."If angels could sing we would not understand them. But angels do understand our songs and Hank Lazer's N18 is the pure product of such listening. Philosophical notations, lyric utterances, journal entries, and aphoristic gleanings are set in a holographic space of the imaginary's shapes. Human readers, hearken to these calls as they echo into silence."—Charles Bernstein

N18 (Complete)

Poetry. "DOUBLESPACE is a noble attempt to bridge the chasm between Language poetry and the traditional anectdotal and meditative poetry of the 'free form' mode. Free form poetry communicates in diciplined, conversational speech, one of its important princples. Language poetry defies this principle and goes about its work in lines that on their surface are a total mystery to the reader of free form. Lazer stands between the two antagonists like a Hercules carrying both on his shoulders adjacent to one another, seeking through contact with both the possibiltiy of creating a language that both may be able to draw upon, each for its own purpose. Or is he trying to say that each has its place in the armory of the modern, each with its own means of communication: the free form through linear writing and Language poetry through effects of language used consciously in opposition to the conventional. There is no question that each mode has its work to do: free form to keep the surface of life familiar yet resonant and Language poetry to uncover through indirection via rejection of the familiar surface to win a whole perspective on life and its surface, which then will cause new thinking and doing close to contemporary fragmented and outworn culture. Hank Lazer has taken upon himself in DOUBLESPACE to bring the division boldly into the open, with the two modes printed side by side under one conver. If we are able to continue to debate the issue, this then that Lazer has done is what is needed. It comes at a moment of historic change in the culture and social arrangements throughout the world"-David Ignatow.

Doublespace: Poems 1971-1989

Roof Books

Inter(Ir)Ruptions

Generator Press

Days: Poems

Lavender Ink

Evidence of Being Here: Beginning in Havana (N27)

Negative Capability Press

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Books by Lazer, Hank