The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience - Softcover

Lauterbach, Ann

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0143037374 ISBN 13: 9780143037378

Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group, 2008

Synopsis

A scintillating collection of essays on language from one of literature's most supple minds

In The Night Sky, her first work of essays, acclaimed poet Ann Lauterbach writes of the ways in which art and poetry are integral and necessary to human conversation. At the center of the book is a series of seven essays, by turns meditative and polemical, that articulate the interstices between Lauterbach's poetics and her experience. She advocates an active encounter with language, at once imaginative and practical, and argues for the importance of art to the well- being of a democratic society. Lauterbach's "nimble and glittering" (Booklist) writings bring us to a new understanding of the relationship between self-knowledge and cultural meaning, as well as demonstrating the ways in which contemporary philosophy and theory might be integrated with practical knowledge.

About this title

About the Author:

Ann Lauterbach is Ruth and David Schwab III Professor of Language and Literature at Bard College. Her work has received fellowship support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine C. MacArthur Foundation. She has published six collections of poetry, including If in Time: Selected Poems 1975-2000.

From Booklist:

A new book of poems and an essay collection showcase the subtle and philosophical work of a rarefied yet captivating poet.

In Hum, Lauterbach taps into both the sensual and the cerebral aspects of consciousness. Her exquisite lyric poems are like lacework, netting feeling and thought, and embodying the inner flickering of light and dark, presence and absence. As Lauterbach gambols between sense and sensibility, elusiveness and lucidity, she sketches a poetic universe similar in topography and weather to that of Stevens and Ashbery. She meditates on the music of Mahler and the art of Botticelli and Gerhard Richter, and, like a particle accelerator, her whirling poems atomize experience. In her most focused and moving poems, Lauterbach, like so many writers, including Jorie Graham in Overlord (2005), traces the concussive emotional effects of 9/11.

The nimble and glimmering essays in The Night Sky offer many insights into Lauterbach's life and poetics. She writes of her journalist father's early death. She muses on the nature of myth, and the difference between information and knowledge. She does write of stars and constellations and the dark, but for all the wonder of the sensuous, she confides that for many poets "language is the material of the world." It is a pleasure to see the forthright and communal side of Lauterbach, the side, one imagines, that inspires her to teach; the source, too, of her gracefully articulate arguments on behalf of poetry and all of art. And how perceptively she marvels over the vitality of today's poetry in spite of its utter neglect by society-at-large, and how eloquently she concludes that art is crucial to living a "life well spent" and to the well-being of a democratic society. Donna Seaman
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About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0143037374
• ISBN 13: 9780143037378
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272