Or to begin again

No: not Gertrude Stein, but Ann Lauterbach. Her ninth collection of poems, 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." This being part of the publisher's (Penguin) blurb, with the book to appear March 2009.

There's an online audio of Lauterbach reading some of her poems from If In Time: Selected Poems 1975-2000 and Hum (Penguin 2005), and in conversation with Charles Bernstein.

By right-clicking on the links for "Full Program" and "Lauterbach in Conversation" you can save the file as an mp3 for repeated listening. I'm saving the pleasure for a complete listening tomorrow a.m.

I also found an interview of her (c. 5 pages long, online) that was published in Rain Taxi (the excellent Minneapolis small press book review journal -- will never give up my subscription to it even though it spurs me to spending far too much money on yet more books and even though the online edition offers even more substantial reading)in 2002. The interview can now be found on the blog ("Mappemunde") of the interviewer, Tim Peterson.

And yes: there is a reference in this interview to Gertrude Stein, getting back to "beginning" and "making new . . .".

Lauterbach: " . . .there's a much much earlier poem of mine which I don't think I kept, in which the first line is 'under the surface.' The poem is called 'Tremble in a Late Age,' because Gertude Stein said it was hard to write poetry in a late age. It's from my first book, actually. So I think I've always been interested in a kind of subversion, or submersion, or something that is about the relation of making new and compelling surfaces by getting under the surfaces of things."

"Tremble in a Late Age" is not to be found in any of the Lauterbach collections I have including the Selected Poems 1975-2000 . . . .if anyone knows the whereabouts of "Tremble", please post the reference.

All this because of/connected to reading American Women Poets in the 21st Century (Rankine & Spahr) and then finally finding my copy of The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience: as I pick it up where I left off on page 162, there's Gertrude again, in reference to present time: "Stein's reticulations, re/presentations of the present as wholly linguistic."