Hank Lazer – författare

This book discusses the extent of distrust and the extent of the misunderstandings that exist in the poetry world.

A wide-ranging anthology of experimental writing—prose, poetry, and hybrid—from its most significant practitioners and innovators  A variety of names have been used to describe fiction, poetry, and hybrid writing that explore new forms and challenges mainstream traditions. Those phrases include experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, surfiction, fusion, radical, slip-stream, avant-pop, postmodern, self-conscious, innovative, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E writing, alternative, and anti- or new literature. Conceptualisms: The Anthology of Prose, Poetry, Visual, Found, E- & Hybrid Writing as Contemporary Art is the first major anthology of writing that offers readers an overview of this other tradition as it lives in the early decades of the 21st century.Featuring over 100 pieces from more than 90 authors, this anthology offers a plethora of aesthetics and approaches to a wide variety subjects. Editor Steve Tomasula has gathered poems, prose, and hybrid pieces that all challenge our understanding of what literature means. Intended as a collection of the most exciting and bold literary work being made today, Tomasula has put a spotlight on the many possibilities available to writers and readers wishing for a glimpse of literature’s future.Readers will recognize authors who have shaped contemporary writing, as among them Lydia Davis, Charles Bernstein, Jonathan Safran Foer, Shelley Jackson, Nathaniel Mackey, David Foster Wallace, and Claudia Rankine. Even seasoned readers will find authors, and responses to the canon, not yet encountered. Conceptualisms is a book of ideas for writers, teachers and scholars, as well as readers who wonder how many ways literature can live.The text features headnotes to chapters on themes such as sound writing, electronic literature, found text, and other forms, offering accessible introductions for readers new to this work. An online companion presents statements about the work and biographies of the authors in addition to audio, video, and electronic writing that can’t be presented in print. Visit www.conceptualisms.info to read more.

This book discusses the extent of distrust and the extent of the misunderstandings that exist in the poetry world.

Offering 12 years of incisive writing about contentiously debated topics in modern poetry, these essays, interviews, and reflections focus on two central themes -- the changing nature of beauty in the lyric and the necessity of finding new ways to embody spirituality. Citing traditions such as language writing and Buddhist verse, this collection explores various approaches to writing about the spiritual experiences that have evolved in American poetry over the past 100 years, including perspectives from the jazz of Monk and Coltrane to the philosophies of Heidegger and Derrida. Accessible, engaging, and instructive, this book will challenge readers to examine both how they listen to the language of a poem and why they are listening in the first place.

Portions, spirit, elegy, lyrics, awakenings, sutra, serendipity, loss, mindedness, rebelling, reveling, unraveling, sounderings, melody, offkey, noisily, rhythm, negation, improvisation, abandon, deflection, renewal, cascade, cadence, grace, weaving, enigma,  shekinah: a door, a jar. These are a few of his favorite things. — Charles BernsteinHank Lazer’ s Abundant Life: New and Selected Poems shows how Lazer thinks with and through writing. All of it is literally experimental in that each new project is a challenge he gives himself, a way to experience life differently. Here we have his “ shape writing” but also short, jagged lyrics reminiscent of Creeley, and long narrative poems about losing one’ s parents. What unites this work is Lazer’ s joint commitment to mindfulness (a quest to find the sacred within the everyday) and to relationality, to dialogue. His books arise and exist in conversation with others: philosophers— such as Levinas and Merleau-Ponty— as well as Zen monks, and admired poets including Emily Dickinson and Creeley. This work may be heady, but it is also deeply human. — Rae Armantrout