For many years, words like “it” and “is” seemed to be my arch enemies. Student essays and poems would be littered with non-referential pronouns (to which I add “this” and “that”) along with that weakest of the verb forms. When I suggested to a student he not use the “to be” verb so much, he asked what that meant. Being is ever a mystery, as are verb forms. “It is” writing can leave the reader fluttering in the air. It’s a pronoun and verb without a map.
Then I taught an entire course on the writing of Gertrude Stein. That was it. It was everywhere. Its significance outweighed its lack of reference; in fact, in Stein’s play of language, It was one of the central characters. It was a pronoun that needed no referent other than itself, rather like the “He” in Ashbery’s early sonnet that refers not to what any particular “he” does in the world, but to the world created by sentences beginning with the word “he.” In the Stein class, our task became one of talking about it, not what it referred to. That was the point; it was a word with its own substance, agency, allure even. If you can’t close-read “it,” then at least you can revel in it.
Which brings me, by commodious vicus of recirculation, to Hank Lazer’s PIECES. Nearly a third of the way in to his diary-poem, he notes: “eventually / we all become / miniaturists.” At the least, Lazer and his poetic tradition do. He quotes Robert Creeley throughout, that master of the thin line, the sudden enjambment. Creeley wrote a poem titled “A Piece”: “One and / one, two, / three.” Three words, three points of punctuation, three lines. This might be yelled out at the beginning of a race (though that would more likely be 3, 2, 1), or it might be a jazz musician’s count to launch a riff. Or it might simply be three words that take us somewhere that has no meaning outside of a left-out context. Three what? Or, as Lazer adds (by subtracting): “too few words / better than / too many.” The triumph for Stein was in recognizing that words were themselves the miniatures we collect, tchhotchkes of the language. Lazer’s approach is different. For him, the word “it” is crucial because it contains multitudes. What the meaning is is the question. It is there somewhere, beginning from the note left to him by his uncle in an unfinished notebook; or as ritual; or as the weather; or as a koan (“what / is / it”); a state of being, or coming into not being (my own father’s last words were “I guess this is it”); as a pointer; as an anchor in time; as a spirit; as a ghostly presence (as of his recently deceased mother). It is also a book, this one, sweeping in circles away from uncle’s handwritten words into meditations on grief, descriptions of a farm, then folding back to the unfinished notebook, the dead yet unfinished uncle. That Lazer has written for so many years in notebooks (both in lines and in shapes) means that he is especially drawn to them. Does his notebook finish the one begun by his uncle? No, but it expands it even as it is born through the miniature.
His uncle wrote about preparing for his “first direct conversation with God.” The man’s life was clearly not simple; there’s a reference without a story to losing his malpractice insurance. That loss of insurance, perhaps, makes him more willing to take the risk of talking to the Almighty. A Jewish Pascal. In order to do so, he puts on his “tallit.” A tallit is a prayer shawl worn by Jews. The word contains “it.” It’s a tall it, an important piece of the fabric needed to connect to God. He “sat down comfortably, set / started the timer, & quietly but audibly talked to God. Time went very quickly.” The talk fills him with such joy that he welcomes being sued. What he said to God amounts to “praise.” “Praise,” like it, is an open and accommodating word. He doesn’t write what about God he praised. God is all referent; He is It, resists detail.
Lazer, as is his habit, does not stay with his uncle’s notebook for long. On the first page of his book he moves from that conversation to thoughts of his mother, recently deceased: “I have / some of her ashes / sitting on / the writing desk.” Ashes are the material “it” we leave behind when we die. Substantial, gritty, a miniature of our bones and flesh. From this place of minimalism, Lazer begins his meditations. They aren’t prayers to God from his sun deck, but a wandering (from town to farm, from line to line, from section to section). He asks the biggest questions with the smallest words. The ultimate it is death, when all of us, like his uncle, turn into those tender buttons, words: “my being turns to words / when / & how / here we go,” then “which word / is / the word” — lacking punctuation, ongoing only as a point of grammar.
PIECES, then, is about what we leave when we die. Lots of holes, and some pieces. The poet’s uncle is gone, his mother is gone, and he is going (though no verb form seems to work there, since it’s an ongoingness that is, at best, the passing of a baton). “i write poems / that no one / reads / not my family — / you are an exception / & you / have my gratitude[.]” The reader is “you” but only you know who you are; he cannot. Pronoun You, meet It. Readers are a function of hope and belief, like God, and so merit his praise, as did God by his uncle in his bathrobe on the sundeck. Lazer’s most recent book — and he has many! — is an extended meditation on his mother’s death. Earlier in his life, he wrote a long farewell to his father. As poet, he knows that farewells are openings, but that those openings are played by other characters, not the ones who inspired the drama. When the Time Comes was the repository of mother memories; this one is less about memory than about being forgotten, productively, in words.
“it does / get better * & it does / get worse[.]” The only link between those short statements is the phrase “it does / get.” Lazer’s asterisk, which also indicates a section break, stops us in our tracks, as the verb cannot. It’s here that Lazer’s zen practice comes in. Where his uncle praised God, Lazer praises the empty fullness of meditation itself. Meditation is a form that approximates a lack of form, the breaking of form, the page’s white margins growing larger than the thin line of lines in the poem. One of Lazer’s side notes is to Kaz Tanahashi’s translation of the Heart Sutra: “it / neither arises / nor perishes.” The Heart Sutra is an ur-text of Buddhism. And it is about the emptiness that is also fullness: here is a stanza from Thich Nat Hanh’s translation:
this Body itself is Emptiness
and Emptiness itself is this Body.
This Body is not other than Emptiness
and Emptiness is not other than this Body.
The same is true of Feelings,
Perceptions, Mental Formations,
and Consciousness.
Which is not to say that this is an idea easily achieved! “it hurts / to live like this / & it will hurt more / not to[.]” It’s on that fulcrum that the poem rests, as acknowledgment of difficulty, and as assertion of balance, ongoingness. Toward the end of the poem, he cites (without naming) George Oppen, a poet of few words, when “he said / world, world — / the miracle / that there is / something to stand on.” If you go to Oppen, you read this: “The self is no mystery / the mystery is / That there is something for us to stand on.” At a 1993 conference about the poetry of the 1930’s, this passage was transcribed on the back of the official teeshirt. When the shirt wrinkled a bit, the “self” became an “elf.” Elf miniaturizes the self, and the world for self, making abstraction into toy or lawn ornament. Of course that wordplay is mine — or the teeshirt’s — but Lazer’s goes as follows: “displacing / the tiny self / its worries & concerns * with awakened awareness / it might be sun / it might be rain.” And so Lazer’s praise is not to God but to those who have died, from whom meanings are transmitted, however mysterious they are.
Transmission is an important term in Buddhism; the teacher transmits to the student his dharma. The dharma is not answer, but question, koan. Hence, at the end of the book, Lazer’s uncle “is waiting still / on the sundeck / listening / waiting for an answer / here we are / waiting with him[.]” We wait with a man whom we know only as a prayer of praise, along with a poet whom we know through his praise of persons, words, process, all that is ongoing, whether or not it ends.
[Published on July 11, 2022 by BlazeVOX, 120 pages, $18.00 paperback]