Hank Lazer

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.

Part One: Issues and Institutions

Opposing Poetries

Begins a series presenting collections of survey articles pivoting around the notion of computation. The inaugural topics include generalized rational approximation subject to linear constraints, matrix exponential approximations in the numerical solution of differential equations, unbounded fan-in circuits, and fixpoint semantics for a Petri net model of definite clause logic programs. Each article is self-contained and all assume a high sophistication in mathematics. Future volumes may focus on a special subfield such as computational graph theory, approximation, or computability. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

From Lazer's ambitious ten-year Notebook shape-writing project, Evidence of Being Here: Beginning in Havana (N27) challenges the way we read and write poetry and reframes the terms of spiritual autobiography. Lazer's handwritten shape-writing presents itself as a visual experience that examines ways in which we both hear and are here.

Evidence of Being Here: Beginning in Havana

La sérénité. La paix. La tranquillité. Le souci du mouvement qui porte toute chose, quelle qu'elle soit. Voilà ce que nous dit Lazer. Voilà ce que nous dit le prophète. La sérénité, la paix, la tranquillité et le souci du mouvement qui porte toute chose quelle qu’elle soit. La sérénité, la paix, la tranquillité et le souci du mouvement qui nous porte et porte toute chose, c’est cela la poésie.

Poems Hidden in Plain View

A startlingly direct, clear look at daily experience, including the graceful changes of direction in consciousness. At once a spiritual journal and a pared down writing that arises, in part, from years of Zen meditation, Lazer’s book continues an American tradition of spiritual accounting: the sacred, the holy, and the mysterious emerging from daily experience. These poems have an inviting simplicity to them. They are poems that reward re-reading. Hank Lazer is the author of thirty books of poetry—most recently Slowly Becoming Awake (N32)—and three volumes of essays. His poems have been translated into French, Chinese, Italian, and Spanish.

Poems That Look Just Like Poems

Harryette Mullen

The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be forms an extended consideration not only of Harryette Mullen’s own work, methods, and interests as a poet, but also of issues of central importance to African American poetry and language, women’s voices, and the future of poetry. Together, these essays and interviews highlight the impulses and influences that drive Mullen’s work as a poet and thinker, and suggest unique possibilities for the future of poetic language and its role as an instrument of identity and power.

Essays and Interviews

The Cracks Between What We Are and What We Are Supposed to Be

Poet Hank Lazer captures delicious moments with the literal strokes of his pen. Lazer has published twenty-two books of poetry. Brush Mind adds another dimension to Lazer's handwritten shape-writing Notebook project (see N24 and N18) with a casualness, freshness, rapidity, humor, and depth in a unique kind of flash poetry book; this book can be read cover to cover in seven minutes. Brush Mind began with a special brush pen given to the poet by Buddhist priest/poet Norman Fischer, and owes a debt to the calligraphy work of the great Kazuaki Tanahashi.

At Hand

Brush Mind

The second book in the Brush Mind series, poet Hank Lazer captures delicious moments with the literal strokes of his pen. Brush Mind began with a special brush pen given to the poet by Buddhist priest/poet Norman Fischer, and owes a debt to the calligraphy work of the great Kazuaki Tanahashi.

Hank Lazer

Books

Your next favorite book is out there