Returning: Hank Lazer’s field recordings   of mind   in morning

For Robert Duncan and Hank Lazer, the price of permission to the loved place with its quotidian miracles is a commitment to particulars, to deep awareness, and to gratitude.

The meadow must be of the mind. No matter how physical the meadow is, leaving its heavy morning dew on the boots that tread there, it always unfolds itself in the mind or nowhere at all.

Hank Lazer’s remarkable new poetry collection, field recordings of mind in morning, is a sequence of chants rung upon the constants and the changes of his returns to a place that offers solace and restoration. Even the few lines quoted above reveal many of the key elements that recur throughout Lazer’s series: “awakening,” “hand,” eyes,” “light,” “hillside,” “mind,” “word,” “quiet,” and “present.” Then, there are “way,” “thinking,” “writing,” “three brown dogs,” “being,” “moment,” “time,” “walking”; and this list is still partial.

In the afterword/notes to the collection, Lazer explains:

Carrollton (Alabama) and Duncan Farm are synonymous: sometimes I use one name, sometimes the other. Duncan Farm …is the 200 acres farm that my wife and I inherited a few years ago…Over the past several years, the farm has increasingly become a key place for my meditation, reading, writing, photography, and observation – all most especially in the early morning.”

Field recordings is part of an ongoing exploration of the similarities of meditation (zazen) and the writing of a kind of spontaneous, improvisatory, immediate poetry – a writing of the moment, a series of transcriptions (or recordings) of specific instances of (morning) consciousness.

In order to provide a potential reader with as clear a sense as possible of Lazer’s central strategy of balancing returns and repetitions with differences and variations, a method that is based on the wonderful paradox that is at the heart of the entire collection.

So, turning from one poem to the next, a reader can fully expect to encounter words and phrases that are repeated. “All art is made, I think, out of recurrence. The point is to have recurrence so that it isn’t mere repetition…The idea is to have these recurrences so that they will always turn up as new…” (Louis Zukofsky) To his great credit, this is what Lazer accomplishes. Each new morning brings delights that are radiantly different since they are re-lighted by the sun of that particular day.

Writing occurs which is in the detail, not mirage, of seeing, of thinking with the things as they exist, and of directing them along a line of melody.” (Zukofsky) Things of the world are perceived by the senses, conveyed to the mind, and made into music by a movement that must include, ultimately, the hand.

As day turns to new day, of course, each person cannot evade being in mourning, Lazer reminds the reader.

Notably, Lazer, Duncan, and Zukofsky have all acknowledged the phenomenon of relationship, communality among artists across the spectrum of time. They firmly believe that any artist who creates without this awareness is necessarily adrift. One should not read Lazer’s sequence without recognizing his kinship with William Carlos Williams.

One could even argue that this stanza looks forward in time to Lazer’s mind and to this present collection:

A close listening to the musical collaboration between Lazer and Holland Hopson—also entitled field recordings of mind in morning and available online from bandcamp.com—will genuinely enhance anyone’s appreciation of the textual collection. Fifteen of the book’s poems are performed in an improvisatory manner, with Lazer reading and often rereading lines as Hopson accompanies with his banjo that creates a sound like an uncanny melding of Appalachia and Japan.

So—

“I mean either you show that you’re alive in this world, in making something, or you’re not.”
–Zukofsky