Hank Lazer has published 12 books of poetry, most recently The New Spirit (Singing Horse, 2005), Elegies & Vacations (Salt, 2004), and Days (Lavender Ink, 2002). He edits the Modern and Contemporary Poetics Series for the University of Alabama Press. Author of Opposing Poetries (Northwestern, criticism), his poems & essays appear in American Poetry Review, Boston Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review (which awarded him the Balch Prize in poetry). New poems from his current poetry project, Portions, appear in current and forthcoming issues of Canary, 1913, and Golden Handcuffs (where Rachel Back and Donald Revell will also have essay-reviews on The New Spirit). Buy his books here, here and here. See a list of work online here. For an essay (that appeared last spring in the Boston Review) on the state of contemporary poetry go here. 1. What is the first poem you ever loved? Why? I don’t think it really happened in the way that the question(er) assumes. There isn’t, as best I recall, a singular poem or moment. Until I finished high school, I was definitely more involved in and more interested in mathematics than poetry. I always read, but not much poetry. I recall my next-door-neighbor cousin Ben introducing me to Allen Ginsberg’s poetry. This would have been late high school. I remember finding that poetry (Howl, America) much more engaging than anything I’d read before. I remember finding T. S. Eliot’s poetry to be of interest. Like many people my age (b. 1950), I was engrossed in the lyrics of the many fine singer-songwriters of the time, especially Bob Dylan, but also Leonard Cohen, Pete Seeger, Joni Mitchell, Lennon & McCartney. I do remember the first poetry reading I ever attended – fall of 1968, as a sophomore in college, I heard Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov read. That I remember… An amazing experience hearing Duncan read “Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar.” 2. What is something/someone non-“literary” you read which may surprise your peers/colleagues? Why do you read it/them? I read some sci fi; I read the sports page every day. I don’t think that what I read would really surprise my peers. 3. How important is philosophy to your writing? Why? Quite important. I am more inclined to read philosophy and essays than fiction. I continue to read and enjoy Derrida, Emerson, Bataille, Shunryu Suzuki, Nishitani, Heidegger, Arakawa & Madeline Gins, among others. Why? For pleasure, for a sense of what is possible, to help in determining what is worth thinking about, to learn more about being. 4. Who are some of your favorite non-Anglo-American writers? Why? Edmond Jabès, Paul Celan, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida. Earlier, I spent a good deal of time reading Lorca, Neruda, Vallejo, Rilke, Trakl, Rozewicz, Milosz, Herbert, Transtromer, Bei Dao, Mallarmé, and others… 5. Do you read a lot of poetry? If so, how important is it to your writing? Yes, I do. Long ago – nearly thirty-five years ago – I learned to consider reading and writing as virtually inseparable activities. I can’t imagine the one without the other. 6. What is something which your peers/colleagues may assume you’ve read but haven’t? Why haven’t you? There are certainly plenty of such holes in my reading, plenty of such embarrassments (or books saved for later), but the reading/writing life is not some sort of pop quiz, so I doubt that there are these imagined colleagues who would care or wonder about what I haven’t read. 7. How would you explain what a poem is to my seven year old? A poem is where language goes for recess. 8. Do you believe in a Role for the Poet? If so, how does it differ from the Role of the Citizen? Perhaps as Oppen suggested in his apt revision, poets are the legislators of the unacknowledged world. As a poet, as one writes and reads and engages in the social world of poetry, one is already engaged in being a citizen. What role? To be honest, and thoughtful. 9. Word associations (the first word which comes to mind; be honest): Lemon**Jefferson Chiseled**Yosemite I**Thou Of**Thee Form**Forum 10. What is the relationship between the text and the body in your writing? Well, there’s not one text and there’s not one body. I do think of words on the page as a kind of choreography – words as bodies deployed on the page. The poem itself constitutes a kind of body. The book as well is another physical, body-like being. The rhythm, sound, appearance on the page all constitute a bodily experience for the reader as well as for the writer in the moment of composition.