Contextual Reading / Hank Lazer’s “Portions”
Portions by Hank Lazer at a window table, Noe’s Bar, San Francisco
Contextual reading probably sounds like cause for examining the page or pages of a poem as closely as one possible can. Something maybe akin to the practice – as I recollect it – of New Criticism’s way of looking for every shred of irony, ambiguity, tone, etc. with which a good poem might further spread its interpretative potential. I remember being well trained – not ungratefully – in that process. At the same time, however, I often questioned what was left out of consideration – for example, the poem’s politics, time in history, and who was this person, the poet? New Criticism is long ago, but not personally forgotten; it remains a tool kit more than occasionally useful to my way of reading, listening, etc.
What I mean today, in terms of contextual reading is something quite different. My interest here is about the literal environment, the architecture that surrounds the actual reading, and the remembrance of the poem as a spatial, sensual experience. Yes, this environment does include a book’s design, its typography, quality of paper, etc. (and that does not require reading from a livre de luxe); the work, in fact, might have been produced on a mimeograph machine in 1966. Those are elements that can clearly transport a reading to a memorable, more concrete level of transparency. In terms of context,however, I am interested in something simultaneously simple and potentially vast.
To back up, if not to indulge a memory, the origins of my awareness of context – at least, on a conscious level - goes way back to a time (1961) when I was hitchhiking on a gravel farm road on the island of Crete. It was about noon on a hot summer day. There were no cars, nor visible persons. Some trees, grasses, and what looked to be a small, white stucco shed further up and off the side of the road. I sat there on a ready-made log bench while I read Faulkner’s Light in August, a significant portion of which takes place in the rural heat and light of a Mississippi summer. While I continued to read for a couple of hours, with not a hitch from car or truck, literally sweating in the shade, the anguish, threats and emotional trials of Joe Christmas, the mixed race, black and white central character, became viscerally alive in every part of my being. It was kind of exquisite form of literary torture. To this day, it remains one of my most powerful reading experiences. At the same time, I also realized it was the context of the reading that made it so strong. Reading the same chapters in a suburban college dorm, I imagine, would have provided only half the pleasure and intensity.
This experience with Faulkner was brought back to me a couple of evenings ago. The June summer sun was gradually going down to the north of Twin Peaks. I was sitting at my favorite reading, writing, drawing and corner window table at Noe’s Bar. It’s a place that has been my local San Francisco watering hole that I have been going to for years now. They have not jacked up the price of Irish Coffee (my stimulant) up into the yuppie stratosphere. And there is a good jukebox with blues, jazz, pop, etc. Most of the time TV sports are accompanied by the juke box without those boring jock commentators. Though often diverse in characters, the hard core clientele is working class and Irish, many of whom are migrants from Ireland. The neighborhood used to be mostly Irish and blue-collar, before the arrival of money that pushed out many families (let alone poets nd artists!). People at the bar know me and think I am the gentleman because – except during the NBA play-offs – I don’t get loud, plus I write, read books and now even make some of my haptic drawings while listening to the noise and music in the bar!
But, back to contextual reading! That evening, somehow I had not put my notebook, or drawing tablet in my backpack. However, I was carrying a copy of Portions, a new, literal pocketbook of poems by Hank Lazer. (Lavendar Ink, Publisher.) It’s a lovely little volume that takes its title from the Torah which is read on the Sabbath in portions from either one or more of 54 sections of this sacred text. From this numerical foundation, Lazer invented a form. To quote him:
…each poem became 3 x 18 = 54 words, the building block of 18 being a mystical Jewish number…For the overall book, similarly, I assembled the poem in eighteens, 18 poems in the first section, 36 poems in the second section, 18 poems in the final…
When I took the book out of my pack, it was early evening with the sun in descent. Its slightly fuzzy yellow light angled through the fog and through the window, on to my table and across the backs and faces of the folks who sat on stools in front of the bar. I began to devour the book - well, sort of - while fog and sun continued to play off each other on the way into darkness.
Written between 2001 & 2008, the book’s language and form is very tight, musical, and crosses several historical, poetic, religious and personal grounds. Through out its formal compactness, we get sharp glimpses of details of victims in Bush’s Iraq war; some either clear and/or oblique dream encounters with the ghosts of Creeley and Duncan; the presence of the goddess, Shekinah (in Yosemite Falls!); glimpses of the Torah; the every growing physcial presence and observatons from Lazer’s Buddhist meditation practice; finally, the intervening focus on his late father’s passing.
Occasionally, as I read, I would look up at my bar companions most of whom were laced in intense conversations. An older, large, dark, long haired woman in tucked-out amber T-shirt fed the jukebox with great Motown sixties stuff, before she stood back by her bar stool to chat with her Irish chums. Briefly, I thought I overheard her say to one them, “I am Jewish,” but I was not sure if I heard that right. If true, her presence as a Jew and answer seemed to resonate with my reading. In actuality, I was much more conscious of her T-shirt - the way the sun intermittently illuminated the deep, gold color of the simple, cotton cloth. Indeed, in a crazy way, the presence of the color, which remained steady on the edge of my consciousness, made me sense that my reading of Portions was being accompanied by a curious form of a lantern! In terms of the text, as it began to more fully emerge, the association now seems entirely appropriate. Listen:
TORAH
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
When I finished the book, I got up and talked with the woman; indeed she told me she was Jewish - a professional nurse. During the 30’s, her mother and father had each gotten, respectively, out of Berlin and Austria. They migrated to Chile before the family moved up to San Francisco in the early 70’s when Allende was overthrown. Though her story was interesting, it did not relate to my immediate experience of reading Portions. The appearance of her luminous shirt – the way it unconsciously invoked a templar light and presence, while giving a kind of choral company to the reading, that, for me, was the significant part of her presence. Some will, no doubt, think this kind association and experience, if not insistence, belongs to the mystical. In fact, I would suggest, if not argue, it probably does!
So as to the value of contextual reading, that’s it for now! For those of us who value the book as both instrument and physical object, it makes sense that we become conscious and explore the possibilities of books to be read in a variety of spatial contexts. Either random or intentional – such as my reading of Hank Lazer at Noe’s Bar – one can never predict what energies my be released, what may become our company, and what may be affirmed where there was something not. A torch may accidentally appear and light the day in more ways than one! Indeed, I do not think I will ever quite forget my reading of Portions, context as it was, and all!
Counter, Noe’s Bar, San Francisco & the corner chair where the woman in the amber shirt was standing.
