Description
(Lavender Ink, 2025)
Twenty years of essays (2006-2024) on contemporary poetry and poetics exploring spirituality, ethics, and international perspectives through talks and exchanges in China and Cuba, with interviews exploring Lazer’s innovative poetry and poetics. This is the first collection of Lazer’s essays since Lyric & Spirit (2008). What Were You Thinking is a companion volume to the simultaneous publication of Abundant Life: New & Selected Poems (Chax Press, 2025).
From the foreword by Charles Bernstein:
What the devil is the spiritual and why do those who flaunt it do so much to discredit it? Hank Lazer asks the same about the lyric, as part of his quest, in these essays, interviews, and commentaries, to reclaim lyric and spirit for an active poetics of invention and improvisation. You could also turn this topsy-turvy: Lazer questions the aversion to lyric and spirit in much of the poetry that claims the mantle of the new. In his gentle way, Lazer shows how old hat that can be. In so doing, he shows the “innovative necessity” (Kathleen Fraser’s phrase) of transvaluing “transvaluation”: not letting the transgressions of youth become the shibboleths of old age. There is an urgent politics here, in a time where liberalism’s illiberalism haunts our haunts and bedevils our democratic vistas.
Grace, says Hank. He’s not talking about a benediction before meals or the fact that some are destined to be saved while the rest of us, well, ain’t. Or dear old Grace, the manager of the local General Store. Lazer keeps discovering grace in unlikely places, offering not answers to our metaphysical questions, but a way to carry on, as at a wild party, or while handwriting a poem, or when returning care to a caregiver in the ICU. Grace is present in Hank’s patience, his refusal to be belligerent, his lucid calm (and calm lucidity). And in his commitment to inconstancy—“mirrored in artistic and improvisational activity.”
For Lazer, poetry has the capacity to celebrate not being present; it offers a way out of the emotional coercion, bordering on sentimentality, that demands presence to authenticate lyricism. Lazer’s poetics advocates being present to the inability to be present; indeed, he values a refusal to be present, even a resistance to presence. He warns that a rhetoric of presence may fall into a trap of naming. As Lazer wryly observes—the demand for lyric presence can be used to exclude what is present in the name of being present. For similar reasons, being mindful in poetry, in the sense of putting virtuousness before experience, can be a kind of mindlessness, just as religiosity is a mask of technorationality.
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