"Of This" by Ann Lauterbach

View this email on a browser Forward to a friend October 3, 2017   Of This   Ann Lauterbach

And so traverses, gun in hand, the creek. We on the other side waiting dreamily as for a wave. The head of the tree is heavy. The pears are not ripe. I do not dare look up, seeing as the day has splurged against my face and you are on the other side where the grid breaks into tiny oracular tiles, wafer thin, distorted, pale. The huge sound is mechanical, not expressionistic: things into other things, exploding. The serial furthers. Were you wearing a sombrero or just a hood to keep hot chords from your skin? Serial, as in many tunes, many kills, weeping additions and accumulating, dry remainders; the cost of endurance.            Copyright © 2017 Ann Lauterbach. Used with permission of the author. About This Poem   "I am not sure what the 'this' in 'Of This' is, other than a general apprehension of the state of things in our political-cultural world: the sense that violence is always near, that it is difficult to know where to look, and the rational 'grid' has lost its bearings as a way to clarity. I was reading recently a dialogue between Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács on early modernist expressionism. I am always interested in how subjective and objective ideas of reality are parsed. Seriality is one way to think about (historical) temporality in which some things remain and others drop away, and there is a remainder, what remains. What remains endures; or we endure what remains. Formally, I like to see how the poem attaches to its materials." —Ann Lauterbach   Ann Lauterbach is the author of Under the Sign (Penguin, 2013). She is the cochair of writing in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. She lives in Germantown, New York.   Photo credit: Sara Barrett Poetry by Lauterbach   Under the Sign (Penguin Books, 2013) "The Plain Sense of Things" by Wallace Stevens "Theories of Time and Space" by Natasha Tretheway "Forecast" by Camille Rankine Poem-a-Day   If you value Poem-a-Day, please consider a monthly donation or one-time gift to help make it possible. Poem-a-Day is the only digital series publishing new, previously unpublished work by today's poets each weekday morning. The free series, which also features a curated selection of classic poems on weekends, reaches 450,000+ readers daily. Thank you! Thanks for being a part of the Academy of American Poets community. To learn about other programs, including National Poetry Month, Poem in Your Pocket Day, the annual Poets Forum, and more, visit Poets.org.   You are receiving this e-mail because you elected to subscribe to our mailing list. If you would like to unsubscribe, please click here.   © Academy of American Poets 75 Maiden Lane, Suite 901, New York, NY 10038