James McCorkle

The Figure of the Reader in Ann Lauterbach's and Susan Howe's Poetry

By James McCorkle

Part two

Unlike Howe, Ann Lauterbach does not draw upon foundational texts, nor does she insert herself through the interrogation of those texts (of Dickinson, Thoreau, Melville, Rowlandson) into the canon, as Megan Williams argues of Howe, thus rescuing herself for posterity. Lauterbach's poetry is dialogic and paratactic: voices enter, not as collage, but as markers of rupture and liminality. Garrett Kallenberg notes, claiming Lauterbach's poetry as oracular, that "Most essentially. . . oracles were not an end product, not an artifact of inspired excess: they were meant to be interpreted" (99). As in Howe's poetry, the withdrawal of an identifiable authorial "I" re-emphasizes the demands placed upon the reader. Writing has ceased, but the act of interpretation continues. Howe's work suggests her own reading--each text is never complete, each word a presentiment.

In Lauterbach's poems, the oracular signals loss: while loss may be defined biographically, in Lauterbach's poetry loss is never contained wholly within that authorial mastery. The leaves of the oracle scatter; implicit in the oracular is that the whole is always and already lost. The titles of Lauterbach's collections, from her first Many Times, But Then to her most recent On a Stair, suggest rupture, interruption, lost antecedents, syntactic betweenness--even her third collection Clamor resists stasis by occupying identities as both verb and noun. Lauterbach's poems, from her earliest collection, have insisted upon metaphoric constructions: displacement occurs, the real that has been habitual or familiar is undermined by the real that is unfamiliar. Her poems, moreover, occupy the position between those two elements--the energy of rupture and displacement is made real.

Like Howe (and Hope Atherton), Lauterbach's poet is expelled from the community:

In that country, there were no heroes to invent a way to fill the hours with parables of longing, so her dreams were blank. Sometimes she imagined voices which led to her uneven gait and to her partial song. Once she was seen running. A child said he saw her fly low over the back meadow and into the pines, her feet raving in wind. The child was punished for lying, made to eat ashes in front of the congregation. The priest said, You have made a petty story. Now enter duration. (AFE 4)

This conclusion of "Rancor of the Empirical" echoes the fanaticism of the Puritans, albeit instituted as a mode of survival, and the resulting Salem witch trials. Segregation from the forest, sequestering of desire (or its commodification), and public discipline for any transgression define our culture and history. Social and political banishment coincide with the banishment of the imagination and the metaphoric. Lauterbach, in a recent essay, cites Girogio Agamben's Infancy and History that with "Descartes and the birth of modern science. . . . having been the subject of experience the phantasm becomes the subject of mental alienation, visions and magical phenomena--in other words, everything that is excluded by real experience" (41). To this, we must add, as Lauterbach's poetry would claim, eros as banished, as rendered a subject of mental alienation.

The connections between eros and the oracular revolve around the desire to reconstruct or re-imagine ways of telling. This desire to examine, in Lauterbach's words, "the various ways in which language constructs both who and how we are (in) the world" so as to "bring us back into a relation to visceral contingencies of human contact" (her emphasis, 22), constitutes what could be termed eros. There is a connection between eros and written language as Anne Carson has observed in regard of the ancient Greek alphabet:

The alphabet they used is a unique instrument. Its uniqueness unfolds directly from its power to mark the edges of sound. For, as we have seen, the Greek alphabet is a phonetic system uniquely concerned to represent a certain aspect of the act of speech, namely the starting and stopping of each sound. Consonants are the crucial factor. Consonants mark the edges of sound. The erotic relevance of this is clear, for as we have seen eros is vitally alert to the edges of things and makes them felt by lovers. As eros insists upon the edges of human beings and of the spaces between them, the written consonant imposes edge on the sounds of human speech and insists on the reality of that edge, although it has its origin in the reading and writing imagination. (55)

The arrangement upon the page of words, lines, and blank spaces as well as the fluid use of margins is one demonstration, in many of Lauterbach's poems--as well as that of many of her contemporaries such as Barbara Guest, Kathleen Fraser, and Susan Howe to name but three--of the edge of sound/word, which maps the contact between silence and material. Such play between contacts, as Carson notes, corresponds to the erotic in that it derives in part from early language play--an atavistic memory of openness. Lauterbach has thematically investigated the cordoning of eros in her earlier collection, Before Recollection--but it is in her last three collections that eros has been sited within the composition or material of the written. The oracular depends upon this erotic imagination, for through the oracular, human contact, in the form of the interpretive community, is renewed.

There is a radical tension between the estrangement enacted by poetry and that estranging of the poet, of Hope Atherton, or of the boy in "Rancor of the Empirical." The community cannot be avowed if it is founded upon the violent discipline of segregation and exile. Reading in the point or moment of rupture or estrangement forms a differing community, that is the community of ongoing interpretation. Jean-Luc Nancy writes,

The community takes place of necessity in what Blanchot has called the unworking [desoeuvrement]. Before or beyond the work, it is that which withdraws from the work, that which no longer has to do with production, nor with completion, but which encounters interruption, fragmentation, suspension. The community is made of the interruption of the singularities, or of the suspension singular beings are. It is not their work, and it does not have them as it works, not anymore than communication is a work, nor even an operation by singular beings: for it is simply their being--their being in suspension at its limit. Communication is the unworking of the social, economic, technical, institutional work.

The oracular, that which eludes the biographical control of authorship as well as the institutional control of meaning, occupies the space of rupture, the moment between the diachronic and synchronic, human and non-human: Something must have lifted our spirits caused our tongues to be untied dreamed us from ruin where the ur-bells begin sun roiled under an elk's body penciled toward or into its subject willing to aspire as the turbulent same doubles its augur "body color" "blood" These (unnamed, above) have a gash or surprise, a smile missing the dangling thing as the tacit crosses over to where meanings are mind changing again into its mystery flume of song and cedars made to weep across from the flags in the signature gardens trajectory of a fragment at all times in view (AFE 89)

These opening lines from "When Color Disappoints (Joseph Beuys)" suggest the imagination's power to have "dreamed us from ruin" or where "mind / changing again into its mystery / flume of song." Joseph Beuys's work, with its allusions to shamanism, the materiality of the body, fetishism, and isolation, is a scattering of letters, tracings, and remnants of materials. The figure of Beuys, who survived near death in the Second World War, parallels Hope Atherton in that his art reflects a return and a simultaneous banishment.

To create a wholeness would negate the perception of the particulars of that wholeness. Her poems keep each "fragment at all times in view." Thus the strands of different voices, the lyric upwellings, the conversational are collected not to create wholeness nor to exhibit the fracture of unity, but as records of the dismemberment of eros and community. The fragmentary signals contingency--"Also, perhaps, maybe" (33)--our very grammar is that of transition and rupture. Identity is a series of constructions--Beuys may reify identity as collections of saved matter, dismembrae, excreta--each severed from the others.

Even when the biographical becomes explicit, the narrative operates as a form of contingencies or examples. Her poem "N/est," from On a Stair, is perhaps her most biographical with its meditation on solitude, the transformation of the female into the object of the gaze, her abortions and childlessness, and her identity as a poet. Shifting from prose, to linear arrangements that appear to be poems, to quotations from other texts, such as Ondaatje's The English Patient, Lauterbach creates a field of ruptures and parallel narratives. Near the end of the poem, Lauterbach writes,

one word instead of another they call to each other sometimes/constructing a place
in which to live a life
words are acts of the world they are prior to us
issued forth
they become facts in the world an address
(OS 84)

It is to words both the reader and writer come to. Each must sift and choose, in that choice comes responsibility or an ethics of freedom.

Lauterbach's unit of composition is that of the page, like Howe, and comprises, as Lauterbach writes in an essay, a shifting "the reader's attention away from temporality and narrativity toward a metonymic mapping, an embodiment" (22). "N\est" is a reconstruction of a past, and of how one is in the world: but most importantly, it is how memory is formed by words, how we remember is structured by language and our choice of words. The memories of her father and his absences (thus her fatherlessness) as well as the decisions to forestall maternity, and then its displacement into the social role not of mother but of poet is constructed through language and the social impingements upon language. The very title of Lauterbach's poem "N/est" with the dash's violent cut demonstrates the field of choices with its pun on nest or home, and the breaking apart of the word into the French "est" (state of being) and its negative, as well as the superlative suffix, and the obsolete forms of "est" meaning east and, redundantly, nest. Nest, that constructed habitation, is both affirmed and negated in its own formation. That the poet's practice is an in-dwelling--or inscaping to borrow from Hopkins--of words, it is also the banishment from habitation, from the familiar, from the safety of nests and family and normative (that is the disciplinary) community.

The reader assumes the responsibility of making meaningful the text; this is not to say Lauterbach or Howe have made meaningless works, but rather part of their work's significance (its signifying value) is the need for the reader to participate in the signifying process. This involves one's own meditation on the historical context of both reader and text and the historicity of words. Howe writes, in regard to Dickinson, "Poetry is never a personal possession. The poem was a vision and gesture before it became sign and coded exchange in a political economy of value" (B 147). This vision is the "ur-bell" that Lauterbach responds to, as did Beuys, and Howe, and Dickinson. Cultural institutions mediate and discipline--and as Howe demonstrates, violate that vision, as in the case of Dickinson, out of the fear of otherness, the forest, eros.