Ann Lauterbach with Anselm Berrigan

Poet Ann Lauterbach and the Rail’s Poetry Editor Anselm Berrigan discuss creative life in the context of our new social reality.

Ann Lauterbach (she/her) has published ten collections of poetry, most recently Spell (Penguin, 2018). Her prose has been collected in The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience (Viking, 2006); The Given & The Chosen; and Saint Petersburg Notebook. She has written on artists Joe Brainard, Jessica Stockholder, Taylor Davis, Kenji Fujita and Cheyney Thompson, among others, and for the exhibition Whole Fragment at the Sheppard Fine Arts Gallery in Reno, Nevada. Lauterbach has received fellowships from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Her 2009 collection, Or to Begin Again, was nominated for a National Book Award. She has been, since 1990, co-Chair of Writing in the interdisciplinary Milton Avery School of the Arts and, since 1997, Ruth and David Schwab II Professor of Languages and Literature, at Bard College. She lives in Germantown, New York.

Anselm Berrigan (he/him) is the Poetry Editor for the Brooklyn Rail, and the author of eight books of poems, most recently Something for Everybody (Wave, 2018). He recently published a longer poem via pdf, Wobble Factory (Absolute Slab Editions), which is available via email if you get in touch with him. He edited What Is Poetry? Just Kidding, I Know You Know: Interviews from The Poetry Project Newsletter (1983-2009), and a new book of his poems, Pregrets, will be published by Black Square Editions at some point during or after the pandemic.

In the Rail:

• Why Poetry Now (Apr 2018)
• Four (Oct 2012)

The New Social Environment — Daily conversations with artists, writers, filmmakers, poets around the world where we discuss creative life in the context of our new social reality.