Some notes on Ann Lauterbach

She certainly is Intense. The work is driven and doesn’t pause much, doesent ask permission, or care much how it is being received. Though it seems to me Ann L. is always reconsidering.

Here are some other attributes: exhaustive, self conscious, investigative, self reflexive and wandering. She relies heavily on syntax, or morphing, deforming, exploring syntax to keep her poems moving. She also uses fragment, and disjunctive ness too. And of course, indeterminate, she is. The hallmark of the post-modern, this last.


The poem “Invocation” in On A Stair, is a more lyrical, more condensed, more romantic version of her work. Probably cause it was written as an Ode, or an apostrophe, a non-elegy, an encouragement for Bernadette Mayer, after she was rendered motionless, speechless and almost sightless from a huge stroke [from which she has since recovered a long way].

Lauterbach relies on spontaneity. Doesn’t plan out even her sentences. Each word has many possibilities for what comes after it. She is in love with possibility. A sentence wanders, taking off in the middle for other lands.

Her word pool is strange. Besides the attributes given to Mayer (Mistress Quaker, Pilgrim, Hooligan of Ages) the poem is motored by “I” words: and complicated half abstract words like conditionally, viable, literal, incipient, brevity, dilated, dim, iteration, potion.

I am not mystified by the comment, Remain among thieves, but can’t figure out the last two clauses, steal advent from avarice, dark from idiot sight.

In her investigations she never gives up, but surrounds some event, some thought, some perception.