untouched
traveling—the wind—
made only for space
perceived
as elegy’s long flight.
And so
darkening chanced over the neck
the shoulder’s ache
not referral to the outside
having not yet aspired
darkening yet
the test or turn savored
the instance leaning forward
to hear
a song of some duration
shelter of what is not said
chanced, here and there, over, darkening—
splendid matter erased.
Could look through to the voice—
could look to find where the voice—
have you a word,
dear instructor, for this?
CLASSICAL AUGURY
City of words
rotunda and desert wanderer
climb the absence
follow this simple curve into the footprint
or find indifference a shelter
as if lost within a cave
confounded
within the merry leafy compost
city of words
ideal translation and misfortune
to hesitate at the sequel to traipse backward onto the
path
stunted underfoot to wait until the sugar dissolves
until the rat’s nose upends a leaf
seeing as the windows are shut
the heads are mounted on rose hips and thorns
prayer is spoken into the dark
city of words
bring the ruin to its proper place among nouns
open its mouth peer into the rosy throat
surely not a new day
her name is common
she walks along the fibrous tissues and sticks
recalls the fictive cause to save to go back to align
to dwell among first attributes of space
but what are these?
Hasty dim angels.
Are they above, below?
Beautiful plural sloping toward duration.
SOME ELEMENTS OF THE POEM
1.
Restive valley/lucidity non-Olympic
squalor of the mundane
ushered, foiled, never golden/blessings un-
told/missed under the standing muscular artifact
she invoked/did not remain the studio scold
lover in negative shield
fled volition’s study if to lie down if to hear
eyes assaulted so to sting
mouth on top of mouth in the hinged vernacular
thought’s respite or figura
arrested in flight. Tact and the cradle jammed
an indecipherable setting across ligatures
of care. Patience and the cloth elbow of a monk
scribe to the half-life of angels/quick
fluidity of names/incantation waits for veracity
if to be sure is to be otherwise among stones
everything undone/inertial tread along
a patriotic map of stars. Voice into hole.
Voice stares not into anything seen but lifts
harmonic for glue in the dark
hot chapel under the patterned glass
and came here with a root in mind.
2.
Came flustered with concision, mother’s
child face in copied blue her
skeptical smile out of hearing out
of hearing in view or Stacy’s
inner ear stares into Lucretius:
atoms for Venus, roses for the lascivious
Miss Stein. Mother at the side of the
carriage/sister Alice
within earshot, smiling infant, smiling
love of the one smiling
back and Will said something about love
and I eyed his mouth and he said diffuse
what’s the use? Mother
may have asked the question within
earshot like that dog. I like the middle voice.
The gesture could be simple
not exhausted not vestigial not a painter’s
despair in the purple cowl of the monk’s robe
in the elegant gallery shoes leaving shortly
for vacation in a small town in France
to read Edward Said writing on Genet
missing voice among many these voices
what is possible/to be
belated among the last ditch
of experience as sound among thieves
restless articulations of this time.
“Noises from the depths,” Deleuze remarks,
“become voices when they find in certain
perforated surfaces (the mouth) the
conditions of their articulation.”
3.
I like the cast of the crisscrossed fence pattern
on the driveway. Shadows belong to footage.
Everything belongs to something else.
The gesture/although I wish I were walking uphill
is to open the hand. I repeat: open your hand.
This to indicate, to sign, suggest
you are willing to give up holding on
or keeping or really in any way
imagining that you possess
anything. There’s light on the wires.
The green is heavily green. August adds
weight to green. Walking uphill
with a friend I said
opening the hand, in response
asking the degree to which
to interfere with or keep kempt
nature in relation to the path
we were following, the surrounding field.
Ann Hamilton and I made a video
when I was in Columbus, Ohio,
visiting/a video of my hand
enacting or rather accompanying
a reading taken from Emerson’s essay
“Circles,” in which, it seemed to me,
O is a frequently repeated
soundscape. I don’t think
but then I don’t know
if Emerson thought about these
recursive Os, but
I felt or feel sure that
writers, some writers, respond
to different registers
of sense possibility. Perhaps this
observation goes without saying
but having said it
I will let it stand not exactly as
a statue or statute, but as a bringing
forth into the space of hearing
obvious or given acknowledgment
that sound conjures itself into
or while seeing what you say.
Here reminded of Lisa Robertson’s
essay, in her book Nilling,
called “Lastingness,” in which she
cites Jean Starobinski’s citing Saussure’s
idea of a “phonic matrix” in classical Latin
poems, finding “mannekins,” isolated
“theme-words whose uttered sounds were
hidden, and sometimes scrambled, beneath
the overt textual semantics—a material substrata
of encoded sound.” I don’t think finding
repeated O sounds in Emerson’s “Circles”
qualifies but it might be a vestigial
trace of this complex arena of sound sense
which I think in the new technological
dispensation is falling away from our shared
calling. “Let’s listen to music,” one girl says
to another, in affectlessness. Vacu
ity
or vestige of the gesture
caught between Venus and Hercules,
promise of the black elision, so to assert
quote a search that is made
through art-making does not have the
clarity of an ideogram unquote, a problem of
naming in relation to image
in the landscape or space, horizon erased
or transposed onto disembodied geometry’s
bright techno-superstructure, so to ask
What is it? only a positive sign of lack
in the architecture’s ultimate
immobility, the inertia of the material
groundmound. So then to desire
a general unframing, passage into the arc
of the kite, to get beyond the finality of
presets, to caress the air, as the difference
between material effects and material meanings.
All the singular figures
in motion, not touching, a pattern of trust
away from the broken authority
of the hierarchical, away from the one.
to Michael Ives
SONG OF THE O (EMERSON “CIRCLES”)
O
horizon
forms nowhere
copious
of forms.
One of now
admits of being outdone.
Our
a lower opens the moral fact
of the around.
Volatile.
Our globe holds
snow
left in cold
opens
for all that is old.
An old planet of the forgoing
the old roads.
You admire this tower, so
being narrowly lost
a gold mine or
more of the crop.
Moons are no more
bounds he obeys, be reformed
showing
commands his own
evolving circle
from a ring larger circles, of circles,
will go on the force
of the individual soul.
For having formed
a circular wave of a local usage, if the soul
over orbit
also outward a vast force
to disclose itself.
There is no outside, no inclosing
how lo!
on the other
a circle around the circle
outline.
To draw a circle outside
antagonist
as prophecies of its innocency
on the divine soul, otherwise.
The last closet was never opened: a residuum unknown.
Our moods do not other
a vast flow!
Choirs of his friends
game of idolatry I know and worth
noble but
O!
We sell the thrones
a great hope, found his shores, found it a pond, Plato going
discordant
opinions we can never go
a conflagration has broken out, and no
man knows.
Valor
the power of self-recovery so as
the magnet once a toy.
Poetry
shows
efflux of goodness so conversation
is a game of circles conversation
bound the common of
stooping under the old
the cloven
flame glows on our walls
oppression, to oppress, to recover our
O only
in orbs, the announcement
in common hours, society sits cold
knowing but prose and trivial toys
loomed so large in the fog’s proportions
no words would be necessary no
a point outside
our hodiernal circle
in Roman houses
diameter of the earth’s orbit
the poet
in the encyclopedia or the or the body
my old steps, and reform.
Ariosto writes me an ode arouses
tones my whole
open to the sides of all the solid old
lumber of the world
from a boat in the pond
against the dogmatism of bigots with this
word out of the book
of concentric circles dislocations
manifold other words explored
gravity of atoms
or the goods
gravitate to you also
omnipresence of the soul behooves
he devotes a winged chariot
draws on his boots to go through the woods lowest
to the verge of our orbit.
The poor and the low be nothing
O broker no
though slower notes
does he owe
to be postponed
no virtue virtues of society.
The terror of reform
grosser moments that they abolish our also
poorly these moments
omnipotence
nothing of
O circular philosopher by beholding
into every hole
left open, my own and obey.
No facts
no Past progression
the soul of circles knowledge contains all circles
no sleep, no pause
abhors the old and old age
only it by many forms of old age no
grow old, but grow to know
their hope organs of the Holy Ghost with hope
and this old age
the coming only is sacred.
No love can be bound by oath
or covenant
no truth so. People only
any hope for them
total growths of the soul
I can know can have no guess for
so the sole
of so to know
the new position the powers of the old
moment all my once
hoarded knowledge to know—we do not know
the old and trodden round
a new road and better goals overpowering or early cloud of so
of our propriety, without knowing
how or of opium
oracular of the heart.
Ann Lauterbach was born and grew up in Manhattan, where she studied painting at the High School of Music and Art. She received her B.A. (English) from the University of Wisconsin (Madison) and went on to graduate work at Columbia University on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. She lived in London for seven years, working as an editor, teacher, and curator of literary events at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Returning to New York, Lauterbach worked in art galleries for several years. She has taught in the writing programs at Brooklyn College, Columbia, Iowa, City College, and the Graduate Center of CUNY. Lauterbach has had residences at Yaddo, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (Boston), the Wexner Museum (Columbus), and the Atlantic Center for the Arts (Orlando). She was a resident critic at the Anderson Ranch in Aspen and, from 2007 to 2011, was a visiting Core Critic (Sculpture) at the Yale School of Art. In 2013 she was named Distinguished Sherry Poet-in-Residence at the University of Chicago. Lauterbach has written essays on artists Joe Brainard, Ann Hamilton, Michael Gregory, and Cheyney Thompson and for the exhibition “Whole Fragment” at the Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery in Reno, Nevada.
Lauterbach has received fellowsh
ips from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Her 2009 collection, Or to Begin Again, was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has been, since 1990, co-chair of Writing in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and, since 1997, David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. She lives in Germantown, New York.
PENGUIN POETS
JOHN ASHBERY
Selected Poems
Self-Portrait in a Covex Mirror
TED BERRIGAN
The Sonnets
LAUREN BERRY
The Lifting Dress
JOE BONOMO
Installations
PHILIP BOOTH
Selves
JULIANNE BUCHSBAUM
The Apothecary's Heir
JIM CARROLL
Fear and Dreaming: The Seclected Poems
Living at the Movies
Void of Course
ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING
Genius Loci
Rope
CARL DENNIS
Callings
New and Selected Poems 1974–2004
Practical Gods
Ranking the Wishes
Unknown Friends
DIANE DI PRIMA
Loba
STUART DISCHELL
Backwards Days
Dig Safe
STEPHEN DOBYNS
Velocities: New and Selected Poems, 1966–1992
EDWARD DORN
Way More West: New and Selected Poems
ROGER FANNING
The Middle Ages
ADAM FOULDS
The Broken Word
CARRIE FOUNTAIN
Burn Lake
AMY GERSTLER
Crown of Weeds: Poems
Dearest Creature
Ghost Girl
Medicine
Nerve Storm
EUGENE GLORIA
Drivers at the Short-Time Motel
Hoodlum Birds
My Favorite Warlord
DEBORA GREGER
By Herself
Desert Fathers, Uranium Daughters
God
Men, Women, and Ghosts
Western Art
TERRANCE HAYES
Hip Logic
Lighthead
Wind in a Box