Hum

From Hum:

Things are incidental
Someone is weeping

I weep for the incidental
The days are beautiful

Tomorrow was yesterday
The days are beautiful

Since the mid-1970s, Ann Lauterbach has explored the ways in which language simultaneously captures and forfeits our experience. In Hum, her seventh collection of poetry, loss and the unexpected (the title poem was written directly in response to witnessing the events of 9/11) play against the reassurances of repetition and narrative story. By turns elegant, fierce, and sensuous, her musically charged poems move from the pictorial or imagistic to a heightened sense of the aural or musical in order to depict the world humming with vibrations of every kind from every source—the world as a form of life.

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.