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

Lauterbach, Ann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067003410X ISBN 13: 9780670034109

Publisher: Viking Adult, 2005

Synopsis

A collection of essays by the poet author of If in Time and HUM explores the writer's advocacy of an active engagement with language and a centrality of art in a democratic society, in a volume that also includes provocative writings on the lives and works of such figures as Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Fanny Howe.

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: Viking Adult
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 067003410X
• ISBN 13: 9780670034109
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272