Ann Lauterbach: An Advance Scott Ferguson

WHATEVER ELSE Ann Lauterbach's poetry may be, it is not "emotion

recollected in tranquility": the title of her latest collection, Before Recollec
tion (Princeton University Press, 1987), hints, in its way, at Words
worth's famous definition. In theWordsworthian poem, the moment of

writing, of "tranquility," is privileged: the poet is presumed to stand mo

outside the tumult of experience, to be able to cast back
mentarily freely
over a course of events and to
his intelligence given interpret their mean
The poem is a kind of coda to the which generates it. It is a
ing. experience
poetry which a faith in the power of "recollection" and
betrays, formally,
the vehicle of this faith is the narrative of which the poem is constructed.
Lauterbach takes aim explicitly at the primacy of this mode. such
Using
poets as Ashbery as amodel, her poetry does not attempt so much to look
back on, interpret and codify experience as it does to a
give picture of
what, in the mind, is like as it happens,
experience in the present moment,
"before recollection." the speaker of one of her poems returns to a
When

place from which she has been severed by time, it is not merely to remi

nisce, to attempt through the usual sort of narrative to recapture

musing
the past, but rather to reflect on the inadequacy of reminiscence, as in

"Bridgehampton 1950, 1980," in the book's first section, "Naming the

House":

Garden, hedge, pool,

to
Planned guard the old line, define
And compose the imagination's brown capacity.
Our extent is more
than memory
Or the text of a poem willed to the wall
our tenacious forebears whisper
Although
Collections, passed from father to son to son
While mother prunes.

Here the object of remembrance, a town whose relation to the

speaker is
not made clear but which, for whatever reason, sets in motion a chain of

Before Recollection. Ann Lauterbach. Princeton University Press, 1987. 72

pp. paper, $8.50.

157

University of Iowa
is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to
The Iowa Review ®
www.jstor.org
unpleasant associations, curiously mirrors the hopelessness, in the poet's
view, of the aesthetic from which she is trying to liberate herself. The per
sonal and the aesthetic concern become the speaker re
indistinguishable:
sists the claims of "recollection" because threaten to entrap her in a
they
past which was male-dominated, constricting; the poet rejects the mode of
narrative reminiscence which would to the "collec
ally her, formally,
tions, passed from father to son to son." The self, Lauterbach appears to be
cannot be made to cohere a formulaic "now" vs.
telling us, through
"then," and in the haunting, dream-like mutations of these poems, this

becomes, a kind of political realization as well.

fascinatingly,
Because the language of these poems attempts to more ex
approximate
our actual state of unease and confusion,
actly they are, in interviewers'
sense of a
language, "oblique" and "difficult." Our inhabiting place, of be
a is disturbed: on first we
ing located within specific situation, reading,
know where we are. We come to accept the non
scarcely only gradually
locations of the poems as places in their own right; interior fields of ob

scurity, as itwere,
from whose vantage points the idea itself of place can be
examined. It is the process of naming the place which is exposed to view, as
in "Naming the House":

... I think . . . of how women, toward evening,

Watch as the buoyant dim slowly depletes

Terrain, and frees the illuminated house

So we begin to move about, reaching for potholders
And lids, while all the while noting
That the metaphor of the house is ours to keep
And the dark exterior only another room

Waiting for its literature.

She dallies now
in plots
But feels a longing for dispersal,
For things all to succumb to the
night's
snow

Omitting and omitting. She has this attention:

To the reticent world enforced by the sensual
And her curiosity, a form of
anticipation,
the failure of to null and too,
Knowing things knowing,
The joy of naming it this, and this is mine.

158
Here the sense of having no place, dissolves before the joy
the discomfort,
of naming the psychic habitation of the poem. Place, like memory, be
comes a of rather than of
phenomenon language actuality.
In the second section of the book, "As Far As the Eye Can See," the sub

ject is that of the visible world, and more particularly, the art of painting.
She is certainly one of the most original and insightful of
our poets who
"write off" of paintings, and yet these poems are so
habitually diligently
and so little on an easy, direct that it is
non-descriptive rely referentiality
to so far as such a
almost impossible paraphrase them. They deal, in thing
is possible in the spare mechanism of language, with what it is possible to
see She takes seriously the changes which have
through representation.
been wrought in the way we see through painting and she has a tragic
sense of the world's no
longer simply being "out there," projected famil

iarly and in art. In "Mimetic" she says:

comprehensibly

Pavese said sentiment, in art, is accuracy,

But the poem would not stretch
To phrase the red cliffs, the seizure of place.
You see the world as self. For us, she
Is world, was
enduring, veracity of
Being what is.We cannot look
At what we love without failure,
The failure of the world to reflect itself.

If, in many poems, we feel plunged

of Lauterbach's chaotically into the

open-ended, ambiguous world of experience "before recollection," in lines

such as these, with like a intake of breath, we
something sharp recognize
this poet's clarity of vision: she is a competent geographer, anything but
lost in the relatively unknown terrain she has chosen as her own.
most of the poems
Perhaps the consummately achieved and complex

treating the visible is "Graffiti." In this lovely, delicately cadenced poem it

is a question of the visual representation of language: the complexity of
the poem arises from the fact that a piece of graffiti (if it is legible to us) is
at the same time a visual and a linguistic sign, proposing both plastic and

conceptual value. In view of Lauterbach's intimacy with visual art, one

can't help feeling that graffiti, if it were poetry, would be the kind of

poetry toward which her own work aspires. An element of chance also

159
comes into play, as the scrawled words are, presumably, come upon ran

domly:

Callow and amorphous, not gods

But adjectives flung at the sun
our skulls
Lovingly, touching lovingly.
This is not a desert.
This is a place where a
pedestrian stops,
Thinking the face in the window is an owl's.
The face in the window is a Renaissance Youth
under a green umbrella.
Eternally snivelling
Across the street, it is written drunk doom
In large bold, short-circuiting the stifled,
drowsy, UNIMPASSIONED grief I remember in London.
Much of London I don't recall, although names
Sail back to me
on small craft, like
plunder.
Loss of names is one kind of leakage
But there is another: the actual scale

Breezing along in daring episodes,

Most of it escaping utterance, falling
Back into the temple housing callow and amorphous
As well as enchanted, and there waits
To be spirited toward us, away from the unrecovered.

I am not certain I understand what "the actual scale" is, and I feel in

capable of elucidating in particular the spell this poem casts. What prin
determines what we are able to recover, what is toward us,"
ciple "spirited
as to that which falls away, "escaping utterance"? This is Prous
opposed
tian territory, but she reminds us also of Rimbaud in the rapt attention
to the nimbus of specific words; to their as vehicles of
paid quality Mys
tery.
Eros are the
and dream subjects of the book's third section, "Psyche's
Dream." Here, with a humor that is at once sly and tumultuous, the erotic
ismade to intervene in our seemingly most humdrum daily thoughts and
activities, that area of life from which sex is fenced out:
typically

160
 . . .
Every now and then, a stray day
Finds its way to the surface of our desires
unguarded
And we couple with it, wrecking all precedent, gaining ground.

Lines such as these speak for themselves. In places, however, the dream
strikes us as too unmediated:
reality

No enchantment but slowed or

longer slowly held
Nocturnes hummed through the arch of ceremony.
There are lunar variations and lovers,
Now and then, limber enough.
not talk in
They do night air. For days
I am elevated among them, suffering variation . . .

Someone, we feel, must bear the responsibility of being in charge of such

stuff; otherwise we're too much in the position of the who
psychoanalyst
faces the raw material of a dream the dreamer of which has disappeared,
no clues as to its or context.
leaving origin
If, however, these poems occasionally stray from their prosodie
sense,

grace redeems them. This grace is lost only in a few of the lines of the
book's final section, "A Simple Service." Here the sumptuous and exact
music of poems such as "Graffiti" is abandoned in favor of
syntactical
briefer notations. The effect can be slight, as in these lines from "Sacred
Weather":

As I lay in the sky

A small blade the night.
opened

The pines have turned.

Now yellowish pinnacles
Rain matte footing
newly
As if all our sun had fallen to mangers.

As I lie in the night

A small star opens the sky.

But at other times an inscrutable, order seems densely packed

fascinating
into the short lines:

161
 Exposure is a ubiquitous curfew
Under three nights of hunter's moon
Beamed onto this:
A hoodlummisfit expert stalking.

In the poem which could serve as Lauterbach's arspo?tica, "Before Recol

lection," the poet states more or less explicitly her aesthetic credo: "Here
we not to let purposes transcend Like the abstract painters
begin: making."
she so much admires, Lauterbach is concerned (almost uniquely, it seems
to me, in contemporary American poetry) with the work of art as an au
tonomous own gesture. an
structure, absorbedly tracing its Surely, this is
advance. At the same time, the poems are saved from mere avant-gardism

by their complexity and their driven lyricism: Lauterbach parts company

with Ashbery in refusing irony. Hopefully, in greater numbers, we will
catch up with her advances and grant her the recognition she deserves.

162