Hank Lazer has published seventeen books of poetry, including Portions (Lavender Ink, 2009), The New Spirit (Singing Horse, 2005), Elegies & Vacations (Salt, 2004), and Days (Lavender Ink, 2002). Lazer’s seventeenth book of poetry N18 (complete), a handwritten book, is available from Singing Horse Press: http://singinghorsepress.com/titles/n18/
Pages from the notebooks have been performed with soprano saxophonist Andrew Raffo Dewar.
Over the past fifteen years, Lazer has collaborated with various jazz musicians, filmmakers, choreographers, and visual artists in seeking new ways to present poetry. In 2008, Lyric & Spirit: Selected Essays, 1996-2008 was published by Omnidawn.
Audio and video recordings of Lazer’s poetry and an interview for Art International Radio can be found at Lazer’s PennSound website: http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Lazer.html
Read some poems from his ongoing notebooks project (and a great interview with some thoughts on the work here). http://plumepoetry.com/2014/04/featured-selection-5/
Lazer says of these poems: “Spacecraft features seven pages/poems from Notebooks 21, 23, and 26, from my ongoing shape-writing project (which now, as of June 18, 2014, extends into Notebook 28 and approximately 2,000 pages). I write these pages without drafts; I usually begin the composition with an inkling of a preliminary vision of the shape for the page. Most pages also involve quotations from my ongoing reading – the Notebooks 21-28 work with material from the writing of Merleau-Ponty, N21 and N23 from The Visible and the Invisible, and N26 from Phenomenology of Perception. I have become a gateway for the writing of the pages; the voices/writings are many more than my own. The page/poem as launching pad?”
spacecraftproject 