LAUTERBACH, Ann

Born 1942

Daughter of Elisabeth Stuart Wardwell and Richard E. Lauterbach

When Ann Lauterbach writes, "The dictionary / is part of the clutter," in the poem "For Example (1) Stepping Out," she voices an ambivalence toward language that her poetry both resolves and redoubles. The lexicon extends the promise of expression, of catharsis, but the words required to bring about this state are mired in usages too numerous to count. To borrow a title from John Ashbery, a poet with whom she is often grouped, Lauterbach's work is a self-portrait in a convex mirror, though the breadth of her vision exceeds the limits of the subjective self.

Critic Charles Altieri has written that "Lauterbach invites us to dwell in the moment when everything is in an unstable transition." Nothing remains still in Lauterbach's poems, and the language mirrors this state of ever-shifting uncertainties. Titles of her collections sound like phrases snatched from the mouths of passersby—Many Times, But Then, Later That Evening, And For Example—and yet even these apparently random phrases reveal the poet's fixed focus on the transitional nature of everyday life.

Lauterbach has written about an early impression of the writing life. Because her father was a foreign correspondent, he often had to leave for Moscow and other destinations for long periods, taking his manual typewriter with him, and these absences left Lauterbach feeling vulnerable and uncertain. Perhaps, then, her initial decision to become a painter was a rebellion against the written word. She was drawn to abstract expressionism, with its intimations of freedom and possibility.

Lauterbach has been associated with the New York school of poetry, a loose alliance that includes Ashbery, who also writes art criticism, and Frank O'Hara, who was curator at the Museum of Modern Art. Other figures include James Schuyler and Barbara Guest. Owing to its difficulty and occasional tendency for inside jokes, the New York School never had the great cultural impact of abstract expressionism, but it has endured as a culturally significant movement long after the decline of the artistic movement that helped spawn it.

Lauterbach made a gradual transition from art to poetry, working in galleries in London and New York City and working on the pieces that would go into her first collection, Many Times, But Then (1979). True to her artistic roots, the poems are closely observed, replete with cultural references, and light-sensitive: "even as the sun flares descending, an image / for which cathedrals have been made, glass cut / to let it in," she writes in the title poem. At the same time, Lauterbach includes autobiographical elements in her work, writing movingly of her mother and grandparents in "The Yellow Linen Dress."

These two strains, the personal and the cultural, continue to exist side by side in Before Recollection, a collection from 1987 where the section called "Naming the House" addresses the former, while "Still Life with Apricots," among other works, is a meditation on art. Lauterbach asserts, "Beauty is a way of meriting surprise." Clamor, published in 1991 by Viking/Penguin, was her first collection to reach a wider audience and set Lauterbach on the path toward recognition as one of America's premier poets. Her feel for painting takes the form of a long poem about a scene of Annunciation in "Tuscan Visit (Simone Martini)," which makes a surprising U-turn back to literature by noticing the Virgin, "her thumb holding a book open, / Her body recoiled from the offered lilies."

And for Example continues to win plaudits for the author. Naming it one of the 25 Favorite Books of 1994, the [Village] Voice Literary Supplement extolled Lauterbach's work as "the song of a brilliant whirligig mind." A MacArthur "genius" grant followed in 1995. "Poems that interest me," wrote Lauterbach in an essay titled "Misquotations from Reality" (1996), "are poems that show me how to proceed, not where to go or what to look at."

Other Works:

A Clown, Some Colors, a Doll, Her Stories, a Song, a Moonlit Cove (1996). On a Stair (1997).

Bibliography:

Altieri, C., "Ann Lauterbach's 'Still' and Why Stevens Still Matters," in Wallace Stevens Review (Fall 1995). Jarman, M., "The Curse of Discursiveness," in Hudson Review (Spring 1992). Schultz, S., "Houses of Poetry After Ashbery: The Poetry of Ann Lauterbach and Donald Revell," in Virginia Quarterly Review (Spring 1991).

—MARK SWARTZ