Public Service Announcement, filed under "Last Minute"

Ann Lauterbach is doing a forum at the New School this evening. This is the same format as the Ashbery reading I reported on a couple of weeks ago. She'll read, then David Lehman and the students/audience will ask questions. The public is invited. Sometimes they charge $5 at the door, but this is rarely enforced.



New School University

66 West 12th Street

Room 510 (5th floor, straight ahead off the elevators)

6:30 p.m.



I have been decidedly unpoetic in my choice of blogmatter lately, so I thought I'd post a couple of thoughts I had about Lauterbach this morning while reading her on the train. Then I'll follow up with a full report tomorrow. (Note to self: Damn it! I forgot my voice recorder.)



The first book by Ann Lauterbach I purchased was And for Example. I got it used, in 1995 or early 1996. Either at the Strand or Alabaster around the corner. I remember it being a fruitful shopping trip but can't recall which store yielded what treasures.



Overcame initial objection to the cover.



I don't like Mythology in a (contemporary) poem. And that's putting it mildly. This is of course excepting classical poetry, the genius of Virgil's Aeneid, Ovid & even the Bullfinchean versions. But in a contemporary poem, the name Persephone or Io or Hera or Juno or Pericles or especially Prometheus or Apollo or--what's his name, Orpheus!--can send me into a eye-rolling nose-holding tizzy. (Here: this might shed some light.)



I do battle with this silly prejudice all the time. I have to, or I couldn't read the many many excellent examples of poetry that can address such subjects and reinterpret such figures with grace, intelligence & humor, and make it new. But still. It's a hump for me. Janus. Yuck. NOTE: I am more than happy to read every single example any of you feel like mentioning.



Anyway. Here's what I like about Lauterbach. She can do the delicate & studious thing but also tell a dirty joke and be genuinely funny and surprising and quick. It's not all snowy swans and trailing togas, which while beautiful are chocking full the mental files already, okay? Her Penelope is a real, earthy, sexy broad. Here's a poem I particularly like from And for Example:



Rancor of the Empirical



A lavish pilgrim, her robes unbound,

checks into a nearby hotel.

Let us spread the wealth.

Let us speak in such a way

we are understood, as a shadow

is understood to assuage these prisms

and these mercurial clasps. She was told

yes and she was told no

which is how she became excessive, spilling

over the sequestered path, her wild garments

lacerating stones.

She took pills against rain.

She slept under tinfoil.

In that country, there were no heroes

to invent a way to fill the hours

with parables of longing, so her dreams

were blank. Sometimes she imagined

voices which led to her uneven gait

and to her partial song. Once she was seen

running. A child saw her fly

low over the back meadow and into the pines, her

feet raving in the wind. The child

was punished for lying, made to eat ashes

in front of the congregation. The priest said,

You have made a petty story. Now enter duration.



I probably would have called this poem, had I written it, something like "The Pilgrim in the Hotel." Because I use words like "rancor" and "empirical" only when I really can't help it. But still, isn't this a terrific poem? And aren't those central lines "She took pills against rain. / She slept under tinfoil." surprising and right?



(To be continued with more about Penelope & dirty jokes & a reading report tomorrow. Lunch break over.)