The deeply philosophical essays in What You Were Thinking: Essays 2006-2024 (Lavender Ink, 2025) by renowned poet Hank Lazer will appeal to poetry lovers and scholars. In addition to the essays, Lazer includes examples of his “shape” poems and a number of interviews that further illuminate his artistic and philosophical commitments. In April 2015, Lazer was selected for Alabama’s highest literary honor, the Harper Lee Award, recognizing a lifetime of achievement in literature.
Throughout the volume, Lazer laments the proliferation of creative writing programs at universities, arguing that they often tamp down creativity and push writers toward conformity rather than innovation. Long ago, he moved into university administration after finding creative writing departments hostile to new approaches to poetry. Instead of formal programs—often experienced as mean, competitive, and closed—he found “community” in diverse, temporary gatherings. One vivid example is an improvisatory performance at a hair salon, where he reports selling more books than at any traditional literary event.
Lazer also makes a compelling argument that American poets tend to disgorge emotion onto the page, focusing narrowly on personal experience. He urges poets instead to engage broader philosophical questions, writing:
“I would like to make the argument that it is ethical to seek to understand better—through poetry—consciousness itself. Or, to put it more broadly, ethics amounts to a sincere and dedicated effort toward a deeper and better understanding of being.”
Chinese students, he suggests, have traditionally been more adept at engaging such larger ideas, though he sees this changing as they, too, increasingly privilege the individual over the larger universe. He turns to Mozi’s Analects, which “offers a lens through which to see the collision of two radically different myth structures: America’s individualism/capitalism versus China’s collectivity/communism.”
Hank Lazer
A Buddhist sensibility underpins many of the essays in What You Were Thinking. Lazer identifies as a Jewish Buddhist agnostic, and for him poetry “leads one into a resonant experience of deepened attention and awareness.” Across the collection, he examines various types of contemporary poetry and a wide range of poets. In one essay, he asserts that “the new poem is a location—a dwelling place in language—for us to reflect on what human being is now.” Contemporary poetry, he argues, “involves us in an experiment, an extension, an ad-venturing in language,” and over the course of a writing lifetime, a poet commits “to find the contours and edges of the invisible and inexpressible.”
Among the poets Lazer examines are Larry Eigner, George Oppen, Susan Schultz, Lissa Wolsak, Glenn Morr, Jonathan Stalling, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Norman Fischer. He finds Oppen’s poetry “stripped down to essentials—few ornamental or creative flights of language-play,” describing it as an ethically insistent poetry intent on seeing anew and investigating the fundamental mysteries of being. Lazer also recounts three trips to Cuba to visit the autodidact poet Juan Carlos Flores, whom he pronounces “the real deal” for his resistance to literary institutionalization.
Lazer praises David Antin’s ability to identify defining elements within “a complex artistic terrain.” Antin proposes “that the artist is one who sticks his foot out in the aisle and thus disturbs and alters the flow of traffic,” a stance that rejects conventional measures of poetic quality such as metrical regularity.
In another essay, Lazer suggests that Susan Schultz’s docupoetry about her mother’s experience with Alzheimer’s can teach readers compassion for suffering. Docupoetry, he argues, offers “a way to be here for one another,” adding:
“It’s that ability to witness, to be mindful of, to listen to what is there instead of what we want to be there, that enables us to see these wanderers—whether they be sufferers from Alzheimer’s or ‘illegal aliens’—more as themselves and less as what we most fear about ourselves.”
Several essays explore the intersection of music and poetry. John Taggart’s work, Lazer notes, often draws on song lyrics, as illustrated in this excerpt:
To sing in accord with
To sing in a chord with
To sing along with the sounds of owls . . .
Who, who would do it?
One schooled in ancient languages,
A Henry David,
Or a John Paul,
Schooled in ancient languages
Who took time
The time it took
To study classics
And the deepest tune of available music.
Lazer also addresses the practical question of how poets earn a living—rarely, unfortunately, from writing poems alone. Income more often comes from teaching, readings, workshops, and prizes. While it is relatively easy today to publish books of poetry, sales remain low. This, he argues, does not signal a lack of interest in poetry. Instead, nontraditional venues such as online journals and audio recordings may be expanding poetry’s reach:
“Most intriguing is the migration of poetry from its long-term residence in the printed book. Most inspiring is the vitality, variety, and accessibility of American poetry today.”
These scholarly essays offer a thoughtful, informed, and engaging critique of contemporary poetry. The book is thoroughly documented, as one would expect from a towering intellectual figure like Hank Lazer, whose career encompasses thirty-six books of poetry, numerous collaborations across artistic disciplines, and decades of innovative teaching and administrative leadership. What Were You Thinking stands as a rich and provocative meditation on poetry’s ethical, philosophical, and communal possibilities.
Hank Lazer
In January 2014, Lazer retired from the University of Alabama (where he continues to teach innovative seminars on Zen Buddhism and Radical Approaches to the Arts for New College and the Blount Scholars Program) and in the University of Alabama’s OLLI program (Oscher Lifelong Learning Institute – Writing, Aging, and Meditation) after 37 years in a variety of positions, including Associate Provost for Academic Affairs, Executive Director of Creative Campus, and Professor of English. For the past ten years, Lazer has convened a weekly Zen meditation group via zoom, Quiet Tide Sangha, and he also travels to lead poetry workshops and meditation retreats.
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