Ann Lauterbach

Ann Lauterbach Poems

Ann Lauterbach Biography

Ann Lauterbach (born 1942) is an American poet, essayist, and professor. Her most recent poetry collection is Under the Sign (Penguin Books, 2013). Her honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the New York State Foundation for the Arts. Her poems have been published in literary journals and magazines including Conjunctions, and in anthologies including American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (W.W. Norton, 2009) and American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language (Wesleyan University Press, 2002). Lauterbach was born and raised in New York City, and earned her B.A. from the University of Wisconsin. She lived in London for eight years, working in publishing and for art institutions. On her return to the U.S., she worked in art galleries in New York before she began teaching. She has taught at Brooklyn College, Columbia University, the Iowa Writers Workshop, Princeton University, and at the City College of New York and Graduate Center of CUNY. Since 1991 she has taught at Bard College, and is currently a David and Ruth Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature there, where she teaches and co-directs the Writing Division of the M.F.A. program, and lives in Germantown, New York.)

The Best Poem Of Ann Lauterbach

Hum

The days are beautiful
The days are beautiful.

I know what days are.
The other is weather.

I know what weather is.
The days are beautiful.

Things are incidental.
Someone is weeping.

I weep for the incidental.
The days are beautiful.

Where is tomorrow?
Everyone will weep.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
The days are beautiful.

Tomorrow was yesterday.
Today is weather.

The sound of the weather
Is everyone weeping.

Everyone is incidental.
Everyone weeps.

The tears of today
Will put out tomorrow.

The rain is ashes.
The days are beautiful.

The rain falls down.
The sound is falling.

The sky is a cloud.
The days are beautiful.

The sky is dust.
The weather is yesterday.

The weather is yesterday.
The sound is weeping.

What is this dust?
The weather is nothing.

The days are beautiful.
The towers are yesterday.

The towers are incidental.
What are these ashes?

Here is the hate
That does not travel.

Here is the robe
That smells of the night

Here are the words
Retired to their books

Here are the stones
Loosed from their settings

Here is the bridge
Over the water

Here is the place
Where the sun came up

Here is a season
Dry in the fireplace.

Here are the ashes.
The days are beautiful.

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