How It Continues to Astonish

During the spring of 1956, a precocious young girl was in the audience of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot during its premiere run at Broadway’s John Golden Theater. As fate would have it, William Carlos Williams, then seventy-two, also attended a performance during the eight weeks that the play ran. That girl would grow up to be the poet Ann Lauterbach. Is it possible that young Ann was there the very same night as Williams? It’s not impossible.

That uncanny coincidence explains nothing. And yet. And yet, I cannot shake the anecdote out of my head whenever I think of Lauterbach’s body of work, which is often. In her work—fierce, complexly lyric—we see some of Beckett’s struggles with silence as both backdrop and foreground of human experience. In Lauterbach’s poems, we catch sympathetic resonances of Williams’s insistence on particulars as the engine for aesthetic insight. He once wrote, “A poem is a use of words ... to raise the mind to a level of the imagination beyond that attainable by prose.” Lauterbach sees those stakes and raises an undeniable and ethical urgency:

The crucial job of artists is to find a way to release materials into the animated middle ground between subjects, and so to initiate the difficult but joyful process of human connection. This is not only the relation of a given self to a given other, but to show how that relation might move further to a consciousness of persons and publics beyond our familiar horizons.
—From “The Night Sky” by Ann Lauterbach

Lauterbach’s poems are abstract, but they are so only in the sense that they play havoc with the notion—and it is ultimately just a notion—that there is a distinction between thinking and feeling. Across her eleven full-length collections, one finds her poems can be witty and urbane; they can be poignant and impassioned. But whatever the poems do, whatever form they discover to articulate anew and for the first time—since the true surprise of language is how it continues to astonish us—the poems are, again and ever, an act of the mind testing the integrity—structural, moral—of the world. In her poems, we are dazzled by how each word can be “a wonder thing.” That is, each word is created by wonder, each evokes wonder, each is a mechanism of wonder. A wonder without sentimentality, a complex, difficult wonder that needs at last to be earned. A wonder like that. Did I say “wonder”? I meant “a world.” Ann Lauterbach means the world. Let’s put it that way. What else is there?