Ann Lauterbach

Distinguished Poet, Essayist &
Visual Arts Critic

“Her exquisite lyric poems are like lacework, netting feeling and thought . . . presence and absence.” —Donna Seaman

A master poet, “rarefied yet captivating ” (Booklist), Ann Lauterbach’s ability to create space with language moves us effortlessly between the worlds of words and art. She was born and grew up in Manhattan, where she studied painting at the High School of Music and Art. She received her BA from the University of Wisconsin - Madison in English Literature, and went on to graduate work at Columbia University on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Deciding to forego further academic degrees, she moved to London, where she lived for seven years, working variously as an editor (Thames and Hudson), a teacher (St. Martin's School of Art), and as curator of the Literature Program at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. Her early poems were published in England.

 Returning to New York in 1974, Lauterbach worked in art galleries, including Max Protetch, Rosa Esman, and Joan Washburn. In the mid-1980s, she began to teach in the Writing programs at Brooklyn, Columbia, Princeton, Iowa, and at The City College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and, starting in the 1990s, at Bard College. She has had residences at Yaddo, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and the Wexnor Museum in Columbus, Ohio, and has been a master teacher at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in Orlando, Florida and visiting art critic at the Anderson Ranch in Aspen, Colorado. She was a faculty poet for the Summer Literary Seminars in Saint Petersburg, Russia in 2006.

Lauterbach has published nine collections of poetry. The most recent, Or To Begin Again (2009 Penguin), features a long fictive poem, “Alice in the Wasteland,” inspired by Lewis Carroll’s great character and T.S. Eliot’s 1922 modernist poem.  Other titles are: Many Times, But Then (1979), Before Recollection (1987), Clamor (1991), And For Example (1994), On A Stair (1997), If in Time :Selected Poems 1975-2000 (2001) and Hum (2005), several chapbooks and collaborations with visual artists, including How Things Bear Their Telling with Lucio Pozzi and A Clown, Some Colors, A Doll, Her Stories, A Song, A Moonlit Cove with Ellen Phelan for the Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum, New York. She has written on art and poetics in relation to cultural value, notably in a series of seven columns for the American Poetry Review entitled “The Night Sky”; essays on sculptor David Smith's writings and drawings,  a collaborative work for sculptor Ann Hamilton's “Whitecloth” catalogue for the Aldrich Museum, and the introductory essay to Joe Brainard's “Nancy” drawings for The Nancy Book, published by Siglio Press (2008).

Lauterbach is currently at work on a new collaboration for Ann Hamilton's “Tower” at Steve Oliver's ranch in Geyserville, California. This work-in-progress was the subject of a talk for the Beineke Library's exhibition and conference “Metaphor Taking Shape: Poetry, Art, and the Book” at Yale in March 2008. A collection of Lauterbach's  prose writings: The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience, published in 2005 by Viking, was  reissued as a Penguin paperback in spring 2008. 

Lauterbach has been, since 1991, Co-Chair of Writing in the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts and, since 1997, Ruth and David Schwab II Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College. She is the recipient of Guggenheim, New York State Foundation for the Arts, Ingram Merrill and John D. and Catherine C. MacArthur fellowships. She is currently a Visiting Core Critic at the Yale School of Art.

About OR TO BEGIN AGAIN (2009)
Ann Lauterbach’s ninth work of poetry, Or to Begin Again, takes its name from a sixteen-poem elegy that resists its own end, as it meditates on the nearness of specific attachment and loss against the mute background of historical forces in times of war. In the center of the book is a fictive narrative, “Alice in the Wasteland,” inspired by Lewis Carroll’s great character and T.S. Eliot’s 1922 modernist poem. Alice is accosted by an invisible Voice as she wanders and wonders about the nature of language in relation to perception. In this volume, Lauterbach again shows the range of her formal inventiveness, demonstrating the visual dynamics of the page in tandem with the powerful musical cadences and imagery of a contemporary master.