"I'm a Jew and a Buddhist living in the Deep South. I feel compelled to define what that means. If I lived in Brooklyn I wouldn't have needed to affirm that," said poet Hank Lazer early this year, smiling, as we sat in the cozy, colorful study at his home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. If Brooklyn and Berkeley are the diaspora, then Tuscaloosa, one would imagine, is the diaspora's diaspora, a designation that is less physical than poetic and spiritual, a place where identity is inevitably dialectical. As Lazer told me, it was in Alabama over the past few decades that he found himself "turning toward phenomenology of the spiritual experience … not a fixed-state thing but a kind of oscillation, movement in and out of spiritual awareness of something that matters, something other than our specific, superficial identity."
Though it was my own first visit to the so-called Deep South, the poet's study, in which we conducted the interview, was familiar: Lazer had previously Skyped with different groups of my literature students in California, and had given readings to them across the digital space. I have been following and teaching Lazer's work, attracted to its contradictions, which so naturally lend themselves to complex, creative conversations with students: His poetry is unapologetically spiritual, yet nondogmatic. It is deeply intellectual yet is written in a manner that's entirely accessible. And Jewishness is central to it but so is the author's sense of being in the margins of the community.
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