Hank Lazer interviewed by Chris Mansel --- The Argotist Onlline
http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Lazer%20interview%202.htm
Excerpt:
CM: Where do you suppose the self-destructiveness trait comes from that occurs in so many writers?
HL: From frustration, as a consequence of marginalization, and from succumbing to a dangerous set of culturally romanticized stereotypes. First, the frustration and maginalization routes. A writer, particularly a poet, places himself in an odd position in relation to dominant cultural value. A poet decides to value certain kinds of somewhat aimless, impractical, non-money-making activities, and he decides to make room and time in his life for these activities. Furthermore, he’s apt to be pursuing a rather elusive mode of language – not necessarily the direct, communicative, “useful,” commercially manipulative kind of language skill that society readily appreciates and rewards (in advertising, in journalism, and in other modes of persuasive and/or manipulative writing). So, what he’s doing with his time is aberrant – hard to explain. And yet, if he is really engaged in a serious and profound relationship to poetry, he does have certain sporadic validating experiences – a sense of connection to a longstanding human enterprise of considerable wisdom, joy, and pleasure. The self-destructiveness may arise as a gesture of anger and frustration, arising from a sense that one’s primary life activity is not appreciated or understood or respected. The self-destructiveness becomes an act oddly complicit with that ignoring and marginalizing by the society at large, while it is also a somewhat desperate call for attention and significance.
http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Lazer%20interview%202.htm
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