Get Ready for the 2021 Thanksgiving Menu-Poem!

This year’s Guest of Honor is Hank Lazer!! This is the twentieth incarnation of the Thanksgiving Menu-Poem! This series began in 2002 with a Menu-Poem to honor Charles Bernstein, and since then this series engages Thanksgiving as the basis to celebrate poetry, poets, and the poetry community. Being a trained professional chef, I have blended my love of food and poetry into a book-length work as a feast of words and art to bring everyone a tiny bit closer together.

I hope you stop by on the 25th for the menu and the poems. Have a great November!

Rockets, Geoffrey

 

This year our guest of honor is Hank Lazer. This poem series represents a combination of autumnal and visual poetries as a tribute to the magnificent works he has created. I have had the wonderful opportunity to work with Hank over the past year publishing his book, field recordings of mind in morning. We had such a good time it was a natural decision to ask him to be this year’s guest of honor.

I had been a fan of Hank Lazer’s work for decades now. His poetry is about openness and experimentation with a questioning attentiveness that blends expressions of meaning with the visual. His work has evolved through the LANGUAGE movement to spontaneous writing to unique handwritten books to musical collaborations. His combination of poetry, writing, and color expand the notion of how the poem can be expressed. His writings take shape in freeform spirals and other organizations, merging to the shape of the page size, which often determines the look of his poem. This artistic text art creates moments of contemplation and introspection for the reader. Everything exceeds intention in Lazer’s writing and it is so very exciting. The title of the Menu-Poem comes from his 2019 book, Slowly Becoming Awake (N32), and the poem, 9/7/16 Carrolton (p38). Written in brown ink:

      is that a voice
a friend in the distance

I hope that this menu-poem adequately expresses my appreciation for him while creating a sense of harmony that interprets my understanding of his work. Or instead of harmony maybe a better word would be a free-translation, or an invocation of the intention Lazer creates.

More About Hank

hanklazer.com https://www.hanklazer.com

PennSound

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 ,

Recent Books

field recordings of mind in morning | poems: hank lazer music: holland hopson (BlazeVOX [books], 2021) 128 pages. You can listen to recorded poems from field recordings of mind in morning poems: hank lazer music: holland hopson

http://www.hanklazer.com/field-recordings/

COVID19 SUTRAS (Lavender Ink, 2020) COVID19 SUTRAS continues his exploration of the nature of consciousness itself, and those momentary sudden inscriptions that are part and parcel of the grace of each human incarnation. https://www.hanklazer.com/covid19-sutras/

Slowly Becoming Awake (N32) (Dos Madres Press, 2019) The book takes us through Lazer’s serious illness (June-July 2016) through his recovery and into his increasing meditative writing time spent at a remote farm in rural Alabama. https://www.hanklazer.com/slowly-becoming-awake-n32/