October 27, 1998 Ann Lauterbach & Heather Ramsdell, with introductions by Sharon Lattig and Stephen Mounkhall.
I am going to begin by paying Ann the compliment of the assuming that you are all familiar with the scope of her accomplishment or in any event, that you soon will be.
In preparation for this evening, I set out to find a neutral vantage point from which to compose an expression that would astutely lead you into the work of Ann Lauterbach. However, in my quest to remain professionally distant, I found that I was unable to disengage the specter of my own tutelage under Ann several years ago at City College. I kept encountering the fact that this particular poetry in both its printed, worldly incarnation and the spontaneous and quotidian form of it to which I was routinely exposed, was and continues to be life-altering in ways that I can point to as material as well as those that possess a less tangible being.
The lingering life of her poetry is a resort I seek when the demands of academia threaten to ossify the language in which I find myself, when discourse becomes a form of captivity. It is a brink I visit to renew my relationship to that language and a spa from which I emerge refreshed. The act of listening nourishes as a drink from a pool in which recognition shimmers with strangeness. It is a place where the comfort of homecoming co-exists with the disturbing thrill of raw exposure.
On A Stair, as you no doubt know, is Ann's fifth and most recent book. It records a poetry of the headlong, at once fluent and arresting, in which an effusion of language casts for vociferation and in that act transfigures moment and recoups the primal force of irrepressible gesture. The arc of the work startles and delights with each evanescent swerve. Reveling in a maze, in becoming's ravishment, the tilted logic of its economy tenders tableau in its unstitching, refuses stillness and will not suffer the general. In negotiating the "brute being" of the world, it charts a new, fluid geometry, ever present, ever self-revising in its measurement of the incalculable modalities of existence.
One enters the milieu of the stair, in Ann's words: "hypothetical desire/cast in real wax" or "the shelf before Is" by joining a search party of a single voice. In so doing faith is regained in the existence of a frontier, one of the unsought, the overlooked "slits" and crevices perhaps forbidden, but sustained by a poetics of cusp. Language here realizes its propensity to hover in the in-between, flush with essence and flushed of it; each stride it ventures alights with unfaltering aplomb.
In posing the question "if all is recast in relation then how does one go on in a going that aspires to ascent?" the place of the precipitous is staked. Each nest constructed there in answer is, by definition, temporary, its building the ritual of the poem.
We say that we "sing" praises. Embedded, then, in the figure of the poet/singer is the notion that poetry itself is a form of praise and perhaps best praises itself. Given this, I invite you now to share in Ann Lauterbach's poetry and its inexhaustible praise for the grand experiment of experience.
--Sharon Lattig
***
If it is true what is said of the work, Heather Ramsdell's poetry has appeared in Arras, Big Allis, Mandorla, Murmur, Sulfur, Talisman, Torque and Whatever.
If it is true what is said of the work, Heather Ramsdell's poetry was selected by James Tate for the 1997 National Poetry Series Award, and published as Lost Wax.
If it is true what is said of the work in backcover blurbs: "The poems in Heather Ramsdell's book Lost Wax map a metaphysical treasure hunt, here a stick, there a door, a closet, a shirt. As the book unfolds, the accretion of their ascetic values forms an ever more human shape in a symphony of poems that is original and profoundly full of wonder."
If it is true what is said of the work during a published conversation with Ann Lauterbach:
then Heather has been known to say:
There's one way of understanding something where you can just go in and pillage, or you can be in this place that's very private -- It's really intimate in some way. You're in this relationship to the work that you're looking at, without forcing -- without reprocessing it, without spinning it in a way that makes it presentable again... (murmur 55).
and Heather has been known to say:
...the things that have affected my work most is work that has affected my perception. That show me, I guess a new way of being in the world or a new way of thinking, or expose something that wasn't there before....I was like nine years old, and there were these two articles on the front page of the newspaper. One of them was on a basketball player who had been caught shaving points and was sentenced to ten years in prison, and the other was this little teeny story about a rapist who was getting sentenced to two years in prison....And suddenly..., it just took away some of the authority of printed matter for me -- the rightness of it. It added a layer to the world that wasn't there before. I existed in a relationship to the things I was reading in a place of authority -- [as if] I could judge something (murmur 52).
And Heather has been known to say, in that same conversation with Ann Lauterbach:
I'll write something and I'll step back and read it, but I'll be reading it thinking, Ann's going to hate this! even just a word, a phrase (murmur 58).
If it is true what I say of Heather's work, long before I learned to appreciate her poetry's subtle sound shifts, her poetry's attention to deafening contrasts in scale (certain sudden gestures after a half hour of rock still silence on a Noh stage), and her poetry's complex structures of presence and absence, I appreciated what was funny in her work:
Such as:
I
ran all the way here to tell you this.
This world is manageable (7).
To call it a prison was mean of them (42).
I am a tourist, amongst the indigenous
tourists, unable to offer directions, (49).
Did I say Thursday? I meant June,
how odd (44).
A stain as large as the shirt would go unquestioned (53).
...the philosophers needn't be nice.
Later they send an invitation after preventing,
according to logic, attendance (37).
The figure vacuums
not hearing the phone, the figure vacuums
and nature does not abhor it...(61).
There is only one way to read you.
Running toward you and away from you (60).
These lines are funny to me because they make me think. They inspire synaptic links between words and events. They make me imagine walking into an auditorium and sitting next to somebody I know because of their notorious propensity to make side comments during the public address.
And then, somehow, while I was sitting next to her commentary on life, it began to dawn on me, somewhat slowly, that, as Mark Mcbeth once said, the baton of sound passes through each line. For example, in her poem "Service of Pointing," we can hear:
could it be known in the lab what the result would be
enough to leave without looking
with bags with assistance with suicidal resolve
in reflection's stead
the water rocking/rotting clouds
of, clouds of
crowds
of
crows, a field, black, burning
with crows
field of answer
white field
of tracks in the snow the willow
weeps, by design (31)
And by design, the blackness of crows, the whiteness of clouds, the indented whiteness of tracks in snow, the bend of the willow towards the water, the lab where the result is yet unknown pass the baton of sound from "clouds" to "crowds" to "crows" to "field, black, burning with crows" to "field of answer," allowing the sensual pleasure of sonic molting to augment the pull down the page towards a "fear of space" (31).
And perhaps I can use a quote by Ann Lauterbach here as a link: She says to Heather, in the conversation I referred to earlier: "I think...one of the reasons why your work is so moving to me, is that it is filled with these [just] choices that don't quibble. And rhetorically it is very very hard to try and get work to become minimalist in the art sense, without it becoming excruciating in its aridity (Murmur 60).
If I was to append an example to Ann's wisdom, I would point (somewhat fearfully) to Heather's "Closet" series, which is at once "a tangle of sleeves (17)", a repository for "strange music, crowds cheering, crowds breathing, crouching close to the ground to grab a brick to hurl back into the crowd / rushing to a common end" (18), and a place where someone might "Go fast for ten minutes, then once completion seems possible," end up "standing there holding a shirt for a long time" (21). This closet, a veritable clown car of objects and people coming in and out, moves me because I feel that the form and the content so gracefully complement each other. The choices we make at the brink of our closets are ones we may have to live with all day or longer.
Recently, I have come to a further appreciation of Heather's work, one where her structures of presence and absence double helix her content, "as Lot's wife did the promised / collapse of her city floor under floor / becoming their axis / is the salt" (5). And earlier in the same poem, "Phantom Limb," the speaker is heard to mutter in what I read to be affectionate frustration: that
The world kept wandering out on us
returning altered (4).
Followed by a string quartet losing its fourth member in the line:
Simultaneous pause in violin, violin, viola (4).
The cello (it seems) has wandered out and returned altered: for the next
line informs us:
Pablo Casals in afterlife feeling for his hands (4).
Sometimes, Heather's poetry is simultaneously the face of Lot's wife and the consequent salt, the pause in a string quartet and the departed, breathless cellist, expired, become spirit, but feeling for the matter that had been part of him.
Sometimes Heather's poetry is simultaneously the cast bronze, the space created by the melted wax and the running out of the original wax surface of the model.
Heather's poetry is, however, all the time, some of my favorite poetry to read, to hear and to read and hear again.
December 11, 1998. Nuala Ni Dhomhnaill & Paul Muldoon, with introductions by Oona Frawley.
Every language is its own world, and I find myself an immediate tourist in writing this introduction, in English, about Nuala ni Dhomhnaill's Irish poetry, because the Irish that is Nuala's is a world of quite different dimensions to the one we inhabit when we use English. Reading her poetry, then, even if in the translation that has made her work available to a larger, non-Irish reading public, is an Immram, a holy voyage of sorts, like those the Irish scribes recorded centuries ago.
In his essay "The Poet", Emerson described language as fossil poetry, suggesting that, could we trace words back through time and place and millions of utterances, we would recover some primal utterance - each
word a poem, in some way profoundly private and mystical. Emerson's idea provides an appropriate way, for me, of thinking about Nuala's poetry in Irish - the corpse that sits up and talks back, as she put in a New York Times Book Review article several years ago. Because of a peculiar set of historical events, Irish, Nuala points out in that same article, is a language that went untouched by major intellectual changes like the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Victorian prudery. Untouched by currents that influenced other European languages, and so in some way reflecting a pristine archive, Irish, in Nuala's hands, becomes something those few steps closer to Emerson's fossil poetry.
Fossil poetry, but never fossilized: for this is poetic language that yanks the untouched Irish into the present, modernizes the myths, and, as her admirers have long pointed out, creates a voice for women in Irish that has been unique and has inspired other Irish women poets to search for a voice as well. To visit the world of Nuala's language is to enter a sensual landscape in which description of nature verges on the primordial, a democracy where contemporary men and women, owners of such modern appliances as Black and Decker chain saws and sports cars, exist alongside mythological shape shifters and the heroes of the Celtic sagas and ghosts. The facility with which Nuala is able to move between the modern world of suburban Ireland and some Otherworld is extraordinary, so that a passage that might have seemed impossible is almost unnoticeable, for you accept it utterly.
In The Lay of Loughadoon, Nuala writes of answering a request by her children for a story:
Tell us a yarn, Ma: don't gloss over
our heritage, don't draw a veil over those
who were our forebears.
Having lifted that veil, the poet writes,
And they believed me: far beyond them still
was the split between sense
and sentiment, prophecy and prophecy fulfilled,
the Subjunctive Mood and the Past Tense.
That split, that breach between the mythological world and the world of our day-to-day lives, is what the poet is able to heal, so that, like children who clamored for a story, we too end up believing - believing that the poet has just snatched her child back from the sidh, the fairy fort; that we might see the child wonder Cuchulain, hero of Ireland, left outside a pub by his thirsty foster parents; that if we continue on the road we might meet Queen Medbh and hear her complain of phone calls from the Badhbh, the vulture, telling her to come for breakfast, armed with a
bottle of wine. Nuala's poetry opens up the possibility of infinite worlds existing simultaneously, and insists on the relationship of myth to our lives - so that ultimately her poetry is not only a resuscitation of, but a creation of mythology.
While there are many ways to discuss this creation, I would like to focus for a moment on the way it disrupts stereotypes of women, and of Irish women particularly, with a humor that is sudden and unapologetic. Cathleen ni Houlihan, that most perfect female representation of Ireland, is taken down from the pedestal, and not for a mere dusting:
even if every slubberdegullion once had a dream-vision
in which she appeared as his own true lover,
those days are just as truly over.
And I bet Old Gummy Granny
has taken none of this on board because of her uncanny
knack of hearing only what confirms
her own sense of herself, her honey-nubile form
and the red rose, proud rose or canker
tucked behind her ear, in the headband of her blinkers.
In collapsing the old ideal by showing the hollowness of the form, Nuala clears the slate for a new Irish woman, one who, rather than existing as a silent inspiration, is given a voice that restores to Irish literature a natural sensuality that for too long went missing, and, in doing so, has given new life to those strong women of ancient Ireland. In this way Nuala's poetry establishes a continuum between past and present, the mythological and the mundane, mining the language in order to discover fossil poetry.
It is my pleasure to introduce Nuala ni Dhomhnaill, who is currently the Burns Library Visiting Scholar at Boston College, and a visiting professor at NYU's Ireland House.
***
The philosopher Gaston Bachelard once described what he called suspended reading, a state where the readers eyes stray not from the page but into it in some way, as the reader falls into a reverie, a word dream. To enter that state, Bachelard later suggests, it is necessary to be serious like a dreaming child -- so quietly, utterly absorbed that the world becomes lost.
With this in mind, I would like to begin by quoting out of context some lines from the first poem of Paul Muldoon's most recent collection, Hay, a poem called The Mudroom, which is an epyllion, or mini-epic, of sorts, a dream-like transgression of time and place that moves between a suburban catch-all room and the far corners of the globe through an astonishing array of allusions that collapse several experiences in time. These lines, for me, serve as an appropriate description for the effect of his poetry:
it was hard to judge where the [poem] came to an end
and the world began, given how one would blend
imperceptibly into the other, given that there was no fine
blue-green line between them.
Paul Muldoon's language seduces the reader into a faith that the poem is a world so that when the poem is finished, resting quietly on the pages of a book, the reader feels a soft, tremored confusion: the room in which one reads has become a private sonnet, the light by which one reads a lyric, so that one is caught on the threshold of the poem as world, the world as poem. Such moments, about the transgression of the real into something at once more subtle, softer, and too more jagged, more ironic, made sense within my struggle to define a body of work that is trailed by such praise as to resemble the train of a gown. Being caught on a horizon between the poem and the world I could not quite define, or reduce Paul Muldoon's poetry, but could, instead, understand the lack of a blue-green seam - a seamlessness that creates a space in which the reader lives undivided from the language of the poem, like Bachelard's dreaming child.
Hay, the title poem in this collection, contains an image that has come, over the last while, to represent Paul Muldoon's poetry for me:
This much I know. Just as I'm about to make that right turn
off Provine Line Road
I meet another bat-up Volvo
carrying a load
of hay. (More accurately, a bale of lucerne
on the roof rack,
a bale of lucerne or fescue or alfalfa.)
My hands are raw. I'm itching to cut the twine, to unpack
that hay-accordion, that hay-concertina.
It must be ten o'clock. There's still enough light
(not least from the glow
of the bales themselves) for a body to ascertain
that when one bursts, as now, something takes flight
from those hot-and-heavy box pleats. This much, at least, I know.
Taken out of the context of the poem, the image of this radiant sun-glowing bale of hay, an image recalling the early poetry, atop a foreign car careening through suburban America, is almost surreal, almost funny, and somehow, for me, infinitely touching. The poetic persona of this collection word journeys through France, Chile, Japan, Ireland and America, through religious, mystic and poetic traditions, all the while bringing with him that glowing bale of hand the music - that hay-accordion, that hay-concertina - that such words and language provide. And so hay provides the poet with a recurring image linking the expanse of space, and time, the collection covers. The ability to conjoin seemingly disparate cultures and traditions leads to the creation of a subtle and revolving mythology that can be at once humorous and tender.
Despite my attempts to reduce Paul Muldoon's word voyages through different cultures and countries and the mysticisms of language itself to some completely comprehensive image, after each word reverie I arrive in a new place, my hands gloved around the book, thinking of lines from an early poem, Paris: -
The worlds less simple for being traveled, / Though.
What better way to finish a journey, than with such wonderment.
It is with great pleasure that I introduce Paul Muldoon, who is Howard G.B. Clark
Professor at Princeton University.
cont'
***
Poetry Series Curators:
Sharon Lattig is pursuing her doctorate in English at Graduate School at City University New York. She is currently conducting research on the relationship of Science to Wallace Stevens' poetry. Her own poetry has appeared in Columbia Poetry Review, murmur; Whatever.
Stephen Mounkhall's work has been published in American Letters and Commentary, No Roses Review, and First Intensity.
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