Resources

by Robert Hershon

Lawrence Stazer: The Use and Pleasure of the Hoax
Teachers & Writers magazine, Volume 15, Number 3, pp. 7-9 (Jan-Feb 1984)
Grades: 10-12
Genre: Poetry

Robert Hershon’s twelfth poetry collection, Calls from the Outside World, was published in 2006. His other titles include The German Lunatic and Into a Punchline: Poems 1986-1996. His work has appeared in American Poetry Review, Poetry Northwest, the World, Michigan Quarterly Review, Ploughshares, and The Nation, among many others. He has received two NEA fellowships and three from New York State. Hershon worked with Teachers & Writers as a teaching artist for many years. He serves as executive director of The Print Center, Inc., and has been a co-editor of Hanging Loose Press and Hanging Loose magazine since the dawn of time.

Lawrence Stazer: The Use and Pleasure of the Hoax

There have been many poets whose writing lives were brilliant, but brief—Chattenon, Marlowe, Keats, Shelley, Rimbaud, Burns, Stazer.

Lawrence Stazer’s public career was the shortest of them all. It lasted about an hour. Here’s why.

A few years ago, I was teaching two high school courses for Saint Ann’s, a private school in Brooklyn. One course was a poetry workshop, an elective in which the students, presumably, had a panicular interest in poetry. The other was a senior English class, mainly concerned with contemporary European novels. I don’t think most of the students in this class actually hated poetry, but they weren’t crazy about it either. Their occasional attempts to write it were, at best, reluctant; they did not pour forth.

For the previous few years the school had provided a generous budget for poetry readings and the students had become a discerning and enthusiastic audience. Among the many poets who had read at the high school was Bill Zavatsky. He had read his memorable Roy Rogers poems, written in homage to the Cowboy King by a ficticious young Japanese narrator and painfully transcribed from short-wave radio broadcasts by their translator. The poems had provoked a certain amount of discussion. This, in turn, had led me to introduce a similar work, correspondence between “Dr. Thalo Green,” director of the Design Conceptualization Institute of Brooklyn, and a group of Harley Elliott’s poetry students from Kansas Wesleyan College. The letters were detailed responses by Dr. Green to student assignments, which had been carefully destroyed before he could read them.

The week after Zavatsky’s reading, during those odd moments of time usually reserved for baseball talk or the teacher’s life story, we talked about Piltdown Man and the Cardiff Giant, the epic poems of Ossian and the one-word poems of Joyce Holland. My poetry class was momentarily diverted but eager to get on to more serious matters. The English class, though, accepted the invitation: a student named Danny Rosenblatt said, “Let’s invent a poet.” The other 11 students in the class agreed. I think some of them thought it would be fun and the others saw it as some sort of revenge for having had to sit through all those damned poetry readings.

We named him Lawrence Stazer. Stazer is an anagram for ersatz. We invented quite a detailed biogranhy for him. He was young, which was why he wasn’t terribly well known. He hadn’t yet published a book, which was why one couldn’t be found in a store, but a manuscript had recently been accepted by a Very Big Publisher, which was why he deserved everyone’s attention. All we needed was his life’s work.

Stazer’s poems were written in a number of ways, some in class, some at home. There were group poems and game poems, tender poems, angry poems, poems that had to contain the words “Ashtray,” “Portugal,” and “savings bank,” short poems, long poems, poems that parodied other poems, poems that stole from other poems, poems designed to be opaque, poems written at blinding speed. In short, any kind of poem we could think of.

It was spring. The weather had grown sweet and tempting. It was the time of year when high school seniors, many of whom already have enough credits to graduate anyway, start becoming restless and then invisible. I had thought that Stazer would at least keep them indoors, but then something even nicer began to happen. As the persona of Stazer grew bigger and more solid, the kids were more and more comfortable hiding behind him. People who wouldn’t write a poem of any sort a few months before were now writing, as Stazer, with ease and delight. They were saying things they would never venture in their own voices and, with a sense that none of this counted as “real” writing anyway, they were saying them in a wonderfully relaxed what-the-hell style. They were also reading more poetry and talking about it more.

The students had discovered what many poets had discovered before them, that it’s sometimes easier to discuss painful or revealing feelings if you’re using someone else’s voice. A class could develop a persona-or maybe two or three-and simply use that voice or voices to write various kinds of work. A good school library should be able to produce some models. Recent ones that come to mind include John Berryman’s “Henry” poems and Robert Peters’ The Gift to Be Simple, an entire book written in the voice of Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers-which prompts me to note that the adopted personality could certainly be that of a real figure, celebrated or not. Writing in another voice needn’t be synonymous with perpetrating a hoax, but I found that the hoax added another element and helped sustain interest over the months. It may be revealing that the class that stayed with the Stazer hoax was not the class that started out with much interest in poems.

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Stazer’s first name, Lawrence, was the result of a promise I had made to the class: if Stazer’s work was good enough, I’d see to it that he got the chance to give a full-scale reading. And I had an impersonator in mind. Poet Larry Zirlin had all the necessary qualities: he was young, he was unknown at Saint Ann’s, he could think fast on his feet, and he always looked sort of bad-tempered.

The head of the English Department wasn’t wild about scheduling still another reading—even some of the English teachers may have been getting poem-weary—but he agreed to it. A couple of weeks later, about 150 high school students and the English faculty gathered in the Harcourt Room. I gave Stazer a fulsome introduction. Larry cleared his throat several time and began to read the poems, with conviction and intensity. The audience was polite, if a bit confused. Occasionally, a lone, unsure laugh would start up, but, in the face of Larry’s total gravity, it would soon trail away into nothingness. Afterward, there were questions about when he started writing and who his major influences were. He didn’t miss a cliche.

Stazer had a two-month gestation period and a one-hour life. During all that time and for weeks afterward, I don’t believe that a single person who was in on the creation revealed the secret to an outsider. If you’ve ever worked in a high school, you know that’s a remarkable record, for students and teachers alike.

A Stazer Sampler

Awaiting the Auditor

the security and exchange commission
splits open like an oyster
there are no pearls

the day holds still and the
stream of life runs white

bums steam open like rotting wallets

Sun Up

the sun’s up to the fourth slat in the blinds
the cat stretches and lies on my lover’s legs
the clock ticks slowly toward six o’clock

when i was a boy, grandpa
your shiny grey beard, your wise blue eyes
and the way your nostrils flared at dinner
when my little league team had lost
you were a lighthouse when the dark days came
now your mangled body, the foundation of my heart

Cisco

he was tired that morning
a sleepy Texas town
with tumbleweed in the streets
and barmaids with lace garters
didn’t tempt him at all
only vodka and milk
to bring out the stars a little
in his clouded head
and last night was there a last night?
Caramba

A Continuity

The rainbow falls down, hung over
And the birds, stripped of their feathers
screaming in the wind

She fell on the ice
and the bells were ringing softly
The chair slid across the room

and I looked for you in Gimbel’s

The floor sat promptly on the spot
The pencil had no point

His nose fell off
his ears
his elbows

and I looked for you in Bloomingdale’s

The flatness was too much for me
Once that snow was white

Orange! Orange! Orange! he shouted
How he loved the word

Flying bugs eat my eyes
but beneath the stars, the barking dogs
an empty quart of ginger ale
and the shoes marching by themselves
the despairing gestures of the empty gloves

And I looked for you in Macy’s
An L.L. Bean shoe seen
through the crack in the door
and the things we said mattered

Now I can’t keep my matches from going
out