BOMB Magazine: Ann Lauterbach by John Reed

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THE ARTISTS VOICE SINCE 1981 BOMBSITE

Ann Lauterbach

by John Reed Web Only/Posted Nov 2009, LITERATURE

Ann Lauterbach. Photo by Eve Thoreau.

The third week of August: historically, its the week when New Yorkers blow town. Air conditioners rattle and spit and give out, and windows are open wide, as if the rolled glass of the tenements would melt in the white sun. But New York is different now. The air conditioners work better, the windows are double-paned. Hot air spews into the streets, making the city an abandoned Martian metropolis, but everywhere inside it is cool. Almost everywhere. Ann Lauterbachlifelong New Yorker and the author of five collaborations with artists, one book of essays, and eight books of poetry (including the 2009 National Book Award finalist, Or to Begin Again)meets me in my grossly under-air-conditioned Crosby Street office. The window unit has declared war, apparently, with our digital recording device. Lauterbach greets me warmly, though she has no idea what to expect; I have planned a series of questions and follow-ups to questions that I hope will give some articulation to not only Lauterbachs poetry, but her longstanding involvement in the arts, and her expectations of our swiftly evolving era. I confess my worries about the digital recorderthat the air-conditioner is overpowering it, that I dont know how to work itand we begin.
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JOHN REED So here we are on Crosby Street; you grew up in New York and lived downtown as an adult. Do you remember anything in particular about this building or this block? ANN LAUTERBACH I was thinking as I was walking here: was my old friend Jan Hasheys loft on this block? Then theres that wonderful restaurant on two floors thats still here, Savoy. Joe Brainard lived on this block on Greene Street. Why are you asking me about Crosby Street? JR Just setting the scene. (laughter) In your poem Ants in the Sugar, who is that man walking along the road? AL Every morning where I now live, in Germantown, New York, a gentleman walks by. He walks down to the river and then he walks back. I think he lives around the corner. I dont know who he is, but hes become familiar. So, I dont know the answer to who that man is. JR And who is that young girl in a pink dress? AL I think the young girl in the pink dress is, in a literal sense, the daughter of a woman I know named Ivy. But the man and the girl are ubiquitous figures in the work, especially the girl. And she moves around; now for several books theres been a girl. She came into the poems around the time of my sister Jennifers death in the mid-80s, and carries ideas of both loss and possibility. I think of her as an avatar. JR I wanted to ask about undead zombies and the newborn dead. These are recurring themes in your book Or to Begin Again and also very current in popular culture this past season. What do you think explains the fascination and what is yours? AL I suppose it must be an anxiety around the possibility that technology is going to outstrip the human. Maybe thats my anxiety, but I think there might be a general fearfulness about that possibility. But also exhilaration, as if maybe we could resign from our human-ness and let zombies take over. To pull this around to my interests, its something in which the imagined has got some ground. My work circles around mortality and an unwillingness to let go of the dead. Or maybe a desire to make a distinction between the living deadzombies, thats to say people that dont feel fully aliveand the dead, who for me often are fully alive in the imaginative sense. I walk around with a lot of dead people in me. JR I have a follow-up question along those lines. Who are the dead and who are the forgotten? AL Theres always an elastic space within language itself and theres a gathering of the dead in my own life. Both my parents died when I was quite young and my sister when she was quite young; I lived as a teenager with my aunt and uncle, who had seven children, five of whom died in various stages of youth. These deaths had a profound effect on my sense of precariousness. Theres also a powerful consciousness of the dead who are not mine. In the case of this book, the dead who are not mine are particularly the war dead. Thats fairly consistent in the worka need to acknowledge or come to an understanding of this. Sometime after this book came out, I realized that a lot of the work from the beginning has a nearness and a far away-ness, that those spaces are flipped back and forth very
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quickly, even within a few lines. That ties into a sense of history but also the notion of ones own intimate familiars and those of others. Theres a kind of space there that is active for me. The title poem of Or to Begin Again circulates around this near-far idea. It was written after a young woman, nine months pregnant, the wife of one of my colleagues, was killed in a car accident. The baby was saved. I had never even met this woman. But the community was profoundly shaken and I found myself in a kind of vortex of emotion that had to do with this here-there, near-far. When I watch the News Hour with Jim Lehrer and they put up pictures of young persons who have died in the Iraq and Afghan wars, Im conscious that each of them has a set of familiars whom I dont know and never will. So theres a sense of how local and how private grief is. The work creates an elastic space between the near and far, which interests me because its a spatial as well as temporal idea.

All photos of Ann Hamilton Tower, Geyserville, California, by Ann Lauterbach, 2008.

JR Im going to shift around a bit, although I do want to come back to this. My next question is also on the political side. When we bailed out the failed institutions of the economic collapse, did we miss our chance at revolution? AL (laughter) When Im feeling quite exhilarated by the possibilities of politics in America theres a piece of me that thinks we dont have to worry about capitalism anymore because its doing a very good job of self-destructing. What an excellent, huge relief to just watch it tank! As if it were an it and not attached to persons who are doing specific things in the name of profit. We probably did miss an opportunity, but revolution is kind of a scary concept. I think change is usually gradual, an accumulative thing. I agree with what Richard Rorty says about new vocabularies changing the way we are, how we behave and how we think. I think slowly we are getting a new vocabulary. We need one really badly. So thats exhilarating for somebody as logocentric as I am. I think the publicand I include myself in the publicis having a hard time understanding why these banks and
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huge firms had to be saved. Its not clear whats happening on the local level for people who lost jobs and homes. So theres that disparity right now, while the stock market already seems to be happy again. Im extremely anxious about politics, because I would really like this new president to have a shot at making a difference in the vocabulary. And Im dismayed that the political right has refused to be interested in factsthats their bread and butter: indifference to facts and an almost phobic response to thoughtfulness. But I still find it staggeringly terrifying to have a phrase like death panel come into the vocabulary, circulate, and become a reality. Why cant we the people, who are not so indifferent to facts, find phrases that are less contaminated and memorable enough to be taken up? JR Theyre not as thrilling, I suppose. And writers like to say things that are unpleasant, so they hear something that appalls them and repeat it 400 times. AL Thats true, we have seen that! Not just writersthe media, right? But still, its not sexy, death panel. Its not a sexy idea. And yet for those who catch onto these phrases it is sexy in a vulgar, promiscuous way. Everyone gets to repeat it on the left and on the rightand it becomes something with a life of its own. Terrifying. JR Theres a Biblical line Is it nothing to you, all who pass by? being used on ads in the LIRR. Are there sections from the Bible that you think of specifically? AL No, but when I was young my mother read from the Bible. She wasnt religious but she loved certain sections for the poetry, the language, and when I was in college I took an astonishing course on the Old Testament. I mean, really: I was astonished. At that moment, I had a kind of awakening of intellectual consciousness that affected me very deeplythe language in relation to ideas and beliefs. So that has stayed with me. The phrase is it nothing to youfrom the Book of Lamentationsis written on the side of a building I have seen from the Amtrak train heading north up to New Haven and Boston and back down. But like Alice in my poem Alice in the Wasteland, I misread it many times as a statement, not as a question: "It is nothing to you, all who pass by. Then one recent trip I realized it was a question; that made such an extraordinary difference. JR What do you think the difference is? AL Well, its an indictment of the worst kind, a sign of indifference and selfabsorption, maybe even a disdainful or contemptuous message from a God: It is nothing to you, you know, as in leave me alone. Its the side of humans that is full of indifference, if its possible to be full of indifference. Is it nothing to you? is the opposite, a call to make itwhatever it issomething to you. I find that difference between question and statement potentially at the core of an aspect of my poetics: to lead with the question and not with the statement. When I began to write I tended toward statements; perhaps I thought poems were meant to generate statements. But I later made an agreement with myself that the statements would have to come through an open questioning space within the poem; the statements would have to be a result of the internal workings or materials within the poem.

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JR Looking back at your earlier books, there seems to me to be more of a tendency toward roundness. The newer work is more jaggedeven shaggy in parts resisting containment. Is it a struggle against containment or something else? AL I think in the early work I had a received idea about poems as being contained, even essentialist, vessels. But my temperament isnt like that at all; my temperament is ragged, diffuse, and messy. This messiness is one way of creating a habitat of possibilityshaggy is a nice wordas if all the edges were frayed. I came to a place where I wanted poems to act more like constellations, brief moments of perception or consciousness. These living fragments are interesting to me because I think this is really the way life is. If youre alert, its not so bad to live inside a set of living fragments as opposed to something with an ordained, formal, narrative whole. But my work is dialectical; it goes back and forth between a desire for consonance and an equal desire for a transient dissonance, for furtive shifts. All those things I find unbelievably exciting. I think this aspect of my work probably annoys peoplethey dont know how to make sense of it. (laughter) JR What is New York City to poetry? AL Well you could ask what is any city to poetry. One of the ways you could talk about modernism is to center it on cities and to see the interesting things that happened in the artsin St. Petersburg, Paris, London and finally New York. There is a way in which the urban set contradicts the natural set, right? We know this; its a truism. In my ideal New York there are always chance operations at work; you dont know whats around the next cornerincipience, fortuitous accidents, the tragic, the terrifying. That puts you, as a poet, on your mettle in terms of how and how quickly language might respond to any kind of event. For my generation I suppose Frank OHara was the figure that captured that sense of possibility and rapid conjunction; hes our Baudelaire, the one who makes the urban into a personal and cultural dance of observation and response. JR Dedications and acknowledgements are an important part of your writing. AL I suppose so. On one level its a way to address loneliness. Dedications make a kind of imagined community. My work is almost always conditioned by specific responses. The generating spaces are often plural, combinations of responses to an exhibition, a reading, a lecture and so on. Dedications to individual persons maybe have to do with a sense that the reading experience is singular and unique,

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just as the experience I might be responding to is singular and unique. The poems are always trying to walk the line between singularity and multiplicity. You know, an acknowledgment that any audience or public is made up of individuals. JR Is there an art of dedication? AL Well, to be dedicated is also to be committed, and I think theres an art of committing to commitment. You have to be very careful when you dedicate that youre not doing it for reasons except those that are very true to your habitat. When I dedicated the selected poems to three poets from the generation before meJohn Ashbery, Barbara Guest, and Kenward ElmslieI felt completely fine about that, because I knew each of them personally and each had given my work a distinct possibility. So it was a no-brainer. It was a way of making claims for them, not for myself. The dedication commitment is also about acknowledging those who surround you, who have been part of you. I dont really understand what it is not to want to do that. Some dedications of individual poems are to honor the connective tissue between event and memory. JR Turning back to Before Recollection, I think of the line Another person from college dies, leaving us unchanged but fewer. Is poetry haunted? AL Its a subtle question, because you could answer it in so many different frames. The other day I was talking with a very good friendthe poet and translator Stacy Dorisabout a section of contemporary poetics embracing the Internet as the generator of form. I said something kind of sarcastic about how easy it is to mistake technology for knowledge as opposed to technology as technique, another way to think about the relation between knowing and making, about forms or methods. The Internet is certainly part of a new vocabulary. Anyway, she said, Poetry is really about loss. Well, maybe it is. What does it mean to be haunted? Im not sure I really believe this, but at a certain moment in my lifetime, people were interested in what poets were doingnot necessarily in what they were saying but in what they were doing. In how they were going about making things, because it had some relevance to the way in which one might think about living. I think thats stopped. So, in that general cultural sense, yes, poetry is haunted. Its lost from a larger cultural discourse in some fundamental way. I remember working for a publishing house in New York when I was young, and seeing T.S. Eliots death announced on the front page of the New York Times. It had nothing to do with whether I was ever going to be on the front page of the New York Times, but I just remember the fact of it, that it was newsworthy, something the culture should notice. For me, this is some of the haunting.

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JR Do you have any banned words? AL Banned words? No, I dont think I do. In the 70s I sent some poems to Robert Bly, who was the editor of a magazine called The Seventies, and he sent them back; he didnt like my work at all. He talked about the dry, Latinate phrases that I used and recommended that I use more words from Romance languages and get away from abstractions. It stuck with me, like any harsh criticism does, but it didnt stop me from using dry, Latinate words. JR Tribeca in the late 70s and 80s: what stays with you from that time? AL A sense that artists could understand themselves as workers. It was a wonderful moment when communities, first in Soho and then in Tribeca, felt like workersits the only way I can put it. Finding a place to live and work that was cheap enough to afford, and making a neighborhood happen, was hugely powerful, a kind of buoyancy of the local. Which I miss. You dont get it in the rural American setting at all. Its really about passing people on the street; it isnt about anything less simple than that. A kind of way in which you could walk along and have a sense that you were part of a tribe of persons who understood what they were doing and why they were doing it. It was exhilarating. We felt like we had won the lottery. We were very serious, but there was an amused irony about it, a selfconsciousness and gleefulness, like we got away with something. And thenreally importantly, I thinkcame the feeling of being invaded. It was like living in some other country and understanding what it is to be aggressed, for people to come and take over your frail habitat. JR It seems to me that many of the commonalities we see today in language rhetorical mish-mash, for examplewere presaged by poetry I heard in the 80s. AL The mish-mash of language? JR Well, then it seemed like insanity to put a set of language from science, lets
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say, against another set of language from aviary studies. You heard poems that were mixing together very diverse rhetorics. Now, you do any Google search and you see it in the same page. Most every web page will have this multiplicity of languages. AL I dont know about prescience, but I do think that poetry has for a long time been interested in the opposite of purity, the idea that poetry is linguistically promiscuous and poets are impure in terms of their appetite for language. Think about Pounds The Cantos, for example, full of wild quotation and citation. But I think maybe theres a difference between a free-for-all collision course and a more accountable interest in different rhetorics or discourses. I dont know I dont want to be stuffy about it. JR Do you see evidences of it in pop culture? AL Of radical differentiation? JR Im thinking of this book that just sold something like 600,000 copies, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a small press book; thats the brilliant part of it. It was definitely something I could imagine some artist or poet printing in 1979 and distributing by Quip machine or something. AL Pop culture is really alert to whats going on, and why shouldnt it be? Thats what makes it pop culture. Im, alas, not clued in about pop culture, except that I like watching television and I like thinking about whats going on there. I got completely addicted to American Idol, for example, so I have some of that energy in me. But American late moderns gave up making distinctions between high and low, right? Theres not much point in doing that, in this culture particularly, and thats part of its richness. I dont like that word, richness its variety, variousness.

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JR Is writing poetry in itself a political act? Im also wondering if your thoughts on this, over time, have modulated. AL You have to be careful with this question because you can get yourself into some JR Whats the scrape? AL Whats the scrape? Uh, a sort of pridefulness or a sloppy idea of what politics really is. I think its extremely privileged to write poetry, and I mean privileged in a pretty profound sense. It has nothing to do with money; it just has to do with the privilege of doing it. Theres a vanity in imagining that to write poetry is to be subversive or inherently political. I think there is an interesting possible relationship between a given persons poetics and her or his politics. And Im interested in a non-overt idea of politics in my poetics, maybe a consciousness of social reality or political reality, and I dont think work is interesting unless it has some aspect of that consciousness. I dont think I really answered your question, but at least it was a half-answer. JR The evasion is more interesting than the answer. (laughter) This probably reflects my misunderstanding of the current economic situation, but to me, they gave all the money back to the bankers and took it away from the arts. AL Well, I dont think it was a quid pro quo; arts didnt have any money in the first place. Im hoping that Obamas administration is interested in the arts. Why wouldnt it be? If you have somebody whos interested in education, one hopes that part of the education is art. It was in my time. It was in your time, wasnt it? JR I went to P.S. 41. There were 40 kids in my class. Schooling in New York City was mostly just propaganda. AL Really? Too bad. JR I did my best at writing this question, but I mangled the thought a little. There is a flight of fancy la Alice in the Wasteland, a poem from your book On a Stair: A Clown, Some Colors, A Doll, Her Stories, A Song, A Moonlit Cove. A future direction? I sense some momentum there. AL I dont know how to think about future directions. Alice in the Wasteland was very liberating for me. The terms in it are terms that have been around for a long time in my workthe place between wonder and waste. That odd dyad is pretty constant. So is a form of innocence or unknowingness. Is that what you sense in terms of a direction? JR You know, I spent all this time in your books over the last five or six days, and if I were just betting on horses, in terms of directions AL But what would be your articulation of the direction? Whats your sense of it? JR Well, to me its a direction that suddenly seems plausible; it not only holds my interest, its something that interests readers. I actually think Alice in the Wasteland has some entry into popular culture with these mash-ups. AL Well theyre everywhere, and this particular mash-up is a very odd one, because its a play between two canonical works and two canonical white male writers, but its also about a kind of refurbishing. Thats whats going on with a lot of young poets: a desire to kick out the jams, to be exhilarated by other concepts

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or formulations. Im just thinking about plantingplants that naturalize. The challenge for me with Alice in the Wasteland was to naturalize a certain kind of knowledge or preoccupation. I read these very high-tone peopleI read a lot of philosophybut I dont think of myself as a high-tone character. So I thought, How do I naturalize that? Can I naturalize these kinds of inquisitions about language? JR That was part of what made it so hard for me to frame that question. On the one hand the poem feels very light and easy, whimsical at times, but there is a kind of anger in that ease. AL You mean a kind of resentment? One of the things I didnt even notice until after Id written this work is that Alice has no home, shes only on a path. Thats interesting to me because paths are tropes obviously for journeys but shes also unhoused. I think this resentful space is about poetry having no house, no place to be other than in its own pleasures. On one level shes wandering around, having adventures in language, on the other hand, is anyone going to offer her a place to be? Give it a place to be?

JR Has white space on the page changed and do you think readers impression of white space has changed because of design changes, the Internet, and so on? AL This problem of white space is interesting. I suppose Mallarm begins it for some. But Charles Olson is the person I have in my head, always, because of his notion of the field and the sense I have of the field or meadow as being a particularly American idea. Im annoyingly interested in American things and aesthetics! It annoys me that I am so interested in them. But I am, in the same ways Im interested in the problems of American politics. So white space for me is about not only about the possibilities of silence or waiting or delaying but also about things that are missing. Its about the idea of the page as a field; you can

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move around in a field, you dont have to go in one direction. I have such a strong visual imagination. I really like seeing pages, the sheer display of them. And yes, the impression of white space has no doubt changed. Its so easy to change how things look since everything is on a screen now, so theres a greater understanding that the justified left margin for example is just a topological conceit, something that happened because of the way people were setting type. Now you can set type any way you want, and use lots of different fonts and so on. But I want poets to have a reason for doing things. So when my students decide to go all over the page, I want them to know why theyre doing it. JR Do you ever yearn for more than just words? AL I certainly have envy of people who have more than just words. The reason I hang around so much with visual artists is because I get great pleasure from visualization of materials and processes. I began as a painter a long time ago, and I miss that immediacy and tactility, being out of the conceptual or mental frame. I dont think words can ever escape those frames. Nor should they, but I do sometimes long for something a little more fundamentally direct. JR Is poetry a live art? AL Well, its not a dead art. Oh, do you mean performance? JR Performance, yes, but more than that. Its wonderful to read a book of poetry by a poet you know personally. AL Its a funny question now, because as we become more and more mediated within techno-spaces, I suppose theres a resurgence of the need for embodied presence. People get excited by the idea of being in the presence of the actual body, the actual voice, the actual figure. Websites like Pennsound and Ubuweb and Youtube are signs that young people are interested in that particular form of witnessing or being present to something happening as it is happening. Hopefully by going through those spaces, theyll come into the actual space. I dont think anything can ever replace that. JR The introduction of your The Night Sky says, The convergence of subject matter with form results in content. The definition seems to exclude or greatly diminish genre works, where form comes first. AL You know, that little concept of mine came out of a conversation I had in the early 90s with a young woman in the Bard MFA program who had learned how to be a very good painter. I was in her studio, and it occurred to me to ask her what the paintings were about. This question produced an intense emotional response; it was extremely painful for her. And I thought, So weve learned how to be really good formalists, but people have stopped thinking about about-ness. So I thought about how subject matter is in fact what belongs to a subject, a person. You have your about-nessess, I have mine. What a subject knows, thinks, feels, where she is from, her DNA all that is various. So I tried to figure out a formulamaybe particular to poetry, maybe relevant to all artmaking. When subject finds form it is released from pure subjectivity. When subjects find form, content is released. This idea of content as the merger between subject and form allows the observer or reader to make meaning. Your subjectivity is allowed to be activated as itself. It doesnt have to understand me or my subjectivity as such. Here is Ann writing a poem and shes got this subjectivity and here is John reading it and he has his subjectivity. The poem has to release or include your subjectivity. I think meaning is made by or in that released content space. Genre is a complicated question and I havent spent a lot of time thinking about it.
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JR I think about it, because 95 out of 100 prose books that come out now are genre works. AL What does that mean to you? JR Well, your definition seemed close towhen they used to call genre the slicks, a million years agothese traditional definitions: in the literary piece, content defines form, whereas in a genre piece, form defines content. That was the hard line. Its fuzzier now, theres a lot of shifting. AL Im averse to almost all tags, all categories. I try to find a place that is untagged. Lyric poetry is a tag. JR Yeah, its impossibly reductive. Is there a better word than experimental? AL Well, experimental is certainly debased. As you know if you read my little essay about experiment in The Night Sky, the word experiment is etymologically tied at the hip to experience and to the Latin root that means to attempt something. This past summer teaching at Bard, I noticed a new, really charged-up value placed on improvisatory work. The word improvisation seemed to have new sheen, new zing. Maybe that has to do with a renewed interest in the idea of variation on a set theme or idea. Work that calls itself experimental without some kind of limit or restraint doesnt interest me. Theres nothing pulling it back; Im interested in what that pull-back is, what the place of restraint is in any real experiment. Whats the better word? I dont know. Everyone wants to be in the foreground. I taught a course last year called The Politics of Form in which I tried to understand whether there was any real reason for the habit of equating experimental or avant-gardist work with progressive politics or if this was just a kind of peculiar received notion in certain cultures, particularly in postmodernist poetics. So we traveled back to early modernism and looked at what went on in Russia, for example, in the early 20th century, the actual revolutionary space where really extraordinary things happened in literature and music and art as well as in politics. We were trying to think about the relationship between cultural and political change and radical formal shifts in aesthetics. We didnt reach any conclusions. But I think we should trade in the idea of the new for the idea of the now. I think postmodernism has given us permission to move across and through time-space. The past is everywhere now, and anywhere you want to find it. JR Is there a suburban aesthetic? (laughter) AL I dont know. My fear is that if there is one, its settled in its habits of perception. These habits scare me. I dont know why; its an urban prejudice. I have a fear of the suburban as an American idea. My dear colleague Anselm Berrigan was in a very smart town near where I live. He called and left a message: Im in this well-dressed hell-hole. I think that is an apt description of the suburban. Neither urban nor rural. Maybe a little insular, a little pleased with itself, a little smug. JR This is the last question: are there any questions we shouldnt ask? AL That questions so strange. But its all fair game I think the coherent answer is no, there arent any questions not to be asked. Whats the famous Stein quote? Supposedly Alice B. Toklas asked her on her deathbed, What is the answer? and Stein answered, What is the question? Perhaps hypothetical, but its very stirring a thing to say as youre dying. Much more interesting than the answer.

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John Reed is author of the novels A Still Small Voice , Snowballs Chance, The Whole, and the recently released All The Worlds A Grave: a New Play by William Shakespeare. Tales of Woe is forthcoming in 2010.

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