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The Duffy Lecture: Michael Heller & Hank Lazer

Presented by University of Notre Dame Creative Writing Program at University of Notre Dame, South Dining Hall

November 14, 2007

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Michael Heller and Hank Lazar will read as part of the Duffy Lecture. Michael Heller is a renowned American poet, essayist and critic. Among his more than half a dozen books are In The Builded Place (1989), Wordflow and Living Root: A Memoir (1997), and Exigent Futures (2003). He also wrote the libretto for the opera, Benjamin, based on the life of Walter Benjamin. He is recipient of awards including the NEH Poet/Scholar grant, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship (NYFA), National Endowment for the Humanities award, and The Fund for Poetry. Heller is recognized as a leading expert on Objectivist poets, poetry, and poetics. The impetus for his continued interest in this particular group of poets began with Heller's discovery of the poetry of George Oppen (and with whom he began a correspondence in the 1960's). Today he is acknowledged by some readers and critics as a Jewish Objectivist poet in the tradition of Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, Carl Rakosi, and Louis Zukofsky. His critical book on the Objectivist poets, Conviction’s Net of Branches (1985), received the Di Castagnola Prize from the Poetry Society of America. Throughout his career, Heller has addressed contemporary avant-garde movements, Jewish and post-Holocaust poetry, poetics, and the literary environment of contemporary poetry. His is a style and gesture seen as joining personal tone with historic incident while reflecting on such themes as the nature of language, poetry, religion, and even memory itself. Heller's interests often point to a succession of American poetry that today is, for the most part, inflected by the American experimentalism of Walt Whitman and the "make it new" of innovators such as Pound and Williams along with infusions of European dada, surrealism, structuralist and post-structuralist thought. A recent book of essays, Uncertain Poetries (2005), deals with the uncertain nature of twentieth-century poetry. He was born in New York City where he now lives. Hank Lazer is a prolific American poet, scholar and editor. His twelve books of poems include The New Spirit (2005), a book-length work fusing Jewish and African American diasporic histories which was nominated for the 2005 Pulitzer Prize. In the last several years, Lazer has given poetry readings and lectures at Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, University of Virginia, Tulane, Columbia, Huntingdon College, the University of California at San Diego, SUNY-Buffalo, Temple, Talladega College, Walt Whitman Arts Center, and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. In addition to his poetry, Lazer is a noted critic of modern and contemporary poetry. In 1996, Northwestern University Press published Opposing Poetries, a two volume collection of Lazer’s essays on contemporary poetry (Volume 1: Issues and Institutions and Volume 2: Readings). For the past three decades, his writings on poetry have appeared in leading literary journals; recently, they tend to focus on the topic of what he names, in the title of one important piece (available on line), “Returns: Innovative Poetry and Questions of Spirit” (see EPC/Hank Lazer Home Page for the link). In 1997, Hank Lazer and Charles Bernstein (co-editors) began a new series in literary criticism, Modern and Contemporary Poetics, for the University of Alabama Press. To date, they have published twenty-two books in the series. Lazer, born and raised in San Jose, California, received an AB degree in English from Stanford University; in addition, he holds MA and PhD degrees in English from the University of Virginia. A Professor of English at the University of Alabama, where he has taught since 1977, Lazer served as Assistant Dean for Humanities and Fine Arts from 1991 to 1997. Presently, Lazer is Assistant Vice President for Undergraduate Programs and Services. Location: Hospitality Room, Reckers