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On Prayer, Poetry and Song: The New Spirit and selections from Portions Note: In Hebrew, the numerical value of the letters in the word "prayer" (tefillah)1 equals
In Hank Lazer's exquisite new book The New Spirit, notions of prayer, song and poetry are intertwined to open a passageway toward the ascendant possibilities embedded in words. From Orpheus, the ancient poet-singer whose music unleashes the transformative power of poetry and whose song never dies, to King David of the Old Testament Psalms whose poetry is prayer, The New Spirit names its predecessors and the tradition where it belongs. The project of this book is to locate, and liberate, the spiritual force intrinsic in poetry, to
spell chant the god name a simple exhalation yah weh yah weh a gust of wind a single breath a sacred expiration
no end to what begins (12)2
In a powerful affirmation of the life force and of the creative energy present in a single word (single sound, single breath3), the poet ö an epic bard in his own right ö sets out on a journey to uncover "what words love and can do", a journey that doubles as a personal odyssey inward. Indeed, a resounding word in the text, and the title of the book's third section, is teshuvah ö a multi-layered Hebrew word signaling a journey of the spirit.4 Simply, teshuvah means a reply, but Lazer utilizes the word in its more complex meaning of "a returning" ö a returning to the sacred dimensions of the word which the attentive poet engaged in "beckoned listening" (16) may hear, and a turning to the poetic as the doorway to the spirit:
to move among at the threshold going here &
there by means of this gateway
a span of rhythmic
joy of knowing something anything very slowly· (64)
The remarkable in Lazer's work is his ability ö his insistence, in fact ö on sounding the spiritual in a fashion that draws from ancient traditions but is always linguistically and visually new. Propelled by the integrity of musical and associative links, words and phrases make their own connections ö thus, "a grave away" becomes "engrave the way" (15), "tristesse" slips naturally into "bless" (10) ö and meaning unfolds in the echoing sounds and unexpected kinship of words. In a similarly innovative fashion, the poems inhabit the entire page, with words traveling from left margin to right, and the journeying motif, the passage over literal and figurative "frozen archipelagoes", manifests itself in the physical text. Alluding to and extending Olson, Lazer writes:
what does not change is the will or disposition to listen what does change is which rhythms which combinations of sounds what in his or her time is inclined to listen to (16)
The above passage serves as an acknowledgment and an embrace of one's individual historical circumstance ö an understanding that the poetry of today must bear the markers of the day, if it is to make a difference. The New Spirit means to make a difference ö to open the heart, awaken the spirit ö and it achieves this end beautifully through the bold and uncompromising linkage of the avant-garde and the spiritual, the experimental and the traditional.5 Finally, and with quiet insistence, Lazer's poem "prayer whisper petition rise into light" (31).
Throughout The New Spirit, Lazer insists upon the necessity of "close listening" ö asserting his strong affiliation with the musical arts and their masters (such as Coltrane and Monk) and evoking a poetic lineage that includes, among many others, Dickinson, Rilke, Duncan and Niedecker. This listening is, for Lazer, an attentiveness not only to the spirit and its turnings, not only to the word and its lyrical dimensions, but also to the necessary poetic forms and formulas that may declare themselves in the writing process ö forms and formulas that may serve as invaluable conduits and vessels for the new and the sacred. Thus, mid-way through The New Spirit, in #5 of the "Prayer" section and with an opening declaration that "i am getting there that new spirit has such// old roots fragments" (26), the poem shifts into triadic word phrases, eighteen to the page. The form repeats itself one more time in the book, in #8 of the "Teshuvah" section. In this fashion, embedded within The New Spirit are the terms for Lazer's next work, Portions:6 lyrics of three-word lines, 18 to the page.7 The effect of this structure is to disrupt automatic and unthinking word usage, and to foreground the weight, shape, sound and significance of each individual word. As Lazer writes in "Wake":
will not talk will not talk at all until
will not say to another will not until begin
first by returning begin by a deliberate return to
the word wake ·
The poetics declared in this lyric is one of great deliberateness ö words put on the page with assiduous attention and care, with a mindfulness of the ways in which words have been abused and misused, and with an awareness of what a word used correctly can do. This is a poetics of kavanah8 ö the deep intention necessary for prayer and poetry both. Thus, a form imposed from without becomes an internal necessity that allows for ritualistic soundings ö as in the thrice spoken kadosh kadosh kadosh (holy holy holy) that marks a climax of the morning prayer service, mentioned in "Dissolves" ö and creates a gateway, an "opening to you" wherein the speaker discovers "immediate gathering affirmation" ("Dissolves"). The threes of Portions are not the only intersection between numbers and meaning in Hank Lazer's work. Composing The New Spirit in the 49th year of his life, Lazer follows this biographic fact to its typological resonances, the 49th year as completing the 7 x 7 year cycle, opening into the Jewish Jubilee year wherein all debts are erased, all slaves freed, all land left to lay fallow.9 The 49th year becomes a transition into a moment of regeneration, of beginning again. As Lazer writes:
7 x 7 years the first time through all seven cycles then begin again with gratitude (44)
But the rebirth is always informed by death ö the song "is / sung against or in complicity with death" (67) ö and the lament of loss lingers on the edges of these lyrics. In keeping with the elegiac, the 49 years doubles as the 49 day (seven-week) period between the Passover and Shavuot holidays ö a period of mourning for tragedies endured through the ages.10 However, the mourning period does not diminish the potential for celebration, nor does the mourning period negate the need to prepare oneself for the celebration; indeed, the seven week period ends with the Shavuot holiday wherein the Torah ö the gift of the Word (prayer, poem, song) ö is given. In "Torah" of Portions, Lazer writes:
every day when i arise i carry the torah
bear it aloft for the torch that it is
carry it burning & unconsumed into the darkness of
the day unable to find a temple i keep
alive the memory of the Temple destroyed the torch
becomes the ash the blossom of my father's bones
In this perfect lyric, every word evokes itself and its opposite, as though only speech and silence together can name the world (the speech is every three-word phrase, the silence the absence that marks every enjambed line, each disrupted syntactical unit). The torch that is the illuminating life-force of the Torah is also the torch that burns down the Temple ö the abode of the Torah. The ash of the Temple becomes the ash of the father's bones, which then blossom, as though from an ash tree. Finally, with no Temple or temple in sight, language becomes the place of the spirit and of the New Song,11 "the house of being a dwelling place for time & the life / of consciousness in it" (60). This place is Duncan's fertile and figurative poetic meadow to which the poet and reader are "often·permitted to return", and this place is also the divine of the Place, HaMakom, another Hebrew name for God. In an age of placelessness and displacement, the beautiful and daring poems of Hank Lazer's The New Spirit and Portions proffer a homecoming to new and familiar terrain, the place where poetry explores, engages and enfolds the spiritual. A Jacob's Ladder12 composed of words and forms that are innovative and lyrical, Lazer's visionary poetry seeks to do nothing less than link the earthly and the divine. As readers, being offered thus the opportunity to speak with the spirit and wrestle with the angels, we have every reason to "·bless / the one who risks adventuring [this] cause" (11).
1 In the Hebrew alphabet, every letter has a numerical value. The practice of translating words into their numerical value and thus uncovering hidden links between words is called gematria. Regarding the word tefillah (prayer), I am referring to the Old Testament spelling of the word, without the "yod".
2 All quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from The New Spirit, Singing Horse Press, 2005.
3 The importance of the breath is foregrounded in the following passage from Lazer's important essay "Returns: Innovative Poetry and Questions of ÎSpirit'": "Poetry marshals its peculiar forces ö particularly the invisible force of breath (ruach) ö as a key partner in making manifest that [divine] invisibility" (Fracture 2(2001): 137). The Hebrew word ruach (breath) also means spirit (as in ruach elohim ö the spirit of God) and life (as in ruach chaim) -- denotations certainly implicit for Lazer in his use of the word "breath". The aforementioned essay offers a close analysis of the poetry of John Taggart and its spiritual dimensions. Lazer is often in dialogue with Taggart, as expressed in The New Spirit in his repeated, incantational, reference to Taggart's book When the Saints.
4 A Ba'al teshuva means "he who returns to religious observance"; the ten days between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur are called aseret yimay teshuva ö the Ten Days of Teshuva, a period of repentance, prayer and deep introspection.
5 I refer here both to traditional texts and traditional religious structures.
6 The title Portions refers to the weekly Torah reading/portion (parasha) read in the synagogue and traditionally identified by its opening words.
7 The number 18 in gematria is chai ö life.
8 Kavanah means intention. In the Talmud it is written, "Speaking the [prayer of] Shema Yisroel Adonai [Hear O Israel] necessitates kavanah [intention]" (Brachot Tractate 5:1). In The New Spirit, one of the three-word phrases Lazer uses, in Hebrew and English both, is "Hear O Israel" (see page 48).
9 "You shall sanctify the 50th year and proclaim freedom throughout the land, for all its inhabitants; it shall be the Jubilee year for you, you shall return each person to his ancestral heritage·you shall not sow, neither reap that which grows of itself·" (Leviticus 25: 10-13).
10 In this seven-week period, known as the Omer, observant Jews do not shave or cut their hair, weddings are not held, and other practices of mourning are observed.
11 The motif of the New Song ö Shirah Hadasha ö resonates through the Torah and its associated liturgy. For example, in Psalm 98 it is written: "O Sing to the Lord a New Song, for He has done marvelous things·" (verse 1). The New Song gestures toward a time of redemption.
12 Lazer alludes to Jacob's Ladder in The New Spirit in a bolded passage that reads: "Yakov awoke changed by the knowing" (23).
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