This month, Ann Lauterbach talks about poetry as magic and the fragmented nature of experience. By Ann Lauterbach Ann Lauterbach's Poem Ann Lauterbach was born in New York City, where she grew up, attending the High School of Music and Art as a painting major. She attended graduate school at Columbia, then went to London where she lived for seven years. Returning to New York she worked in art galleries until the 1980s, when she began teaching poetry and poetics at Brooklyn College, Columbia, and elsewhere. She has published five collections of poetry, including Clamor, And For Example , and On A Stair .
Nothing is optional.
I don't want, and I don't think it is necessary, to choose between fragments and wholes. I think we need to be glad for these bits and pieces, and not insist that they have to fit into some big picture, some imposed coherence. Fragments in this sense suggest the possibility of variety and difference rather than coherence and sameness. They are the places of synapse, or joint, in the scaffold or skeleton of English. They are really nice fragments of language.