The third week of August: historically, it’s the week when New Yorkers blow town. Air conditioners rattle and spit and give out, and windows are open wide, as if the rolled glass of the tenements would melt in the white sun. But New York is different now. The air conditioners work better, the windows are double-paned. Hot air spews into the streets, making the city an abandoned Martian metropolis, but everywhere inside it is cool. Almost everywhere. Ann Lauterbach—lifelong New Yorker and the author of five collaborations with artists, one book of essays, and eight books of poetry (including the 2009 National Book Award finalist, Or to Begin Again)—meets me in my grossly under-air-conditioned Crosby Street office. The window unit has declared war, apparently, with our digital recording device.
Lauterbach greets me warmly, though she has no idea what to expect; I have planned a series of questions and follow-ups to questions that I hope will give some articulation to not only Lauterbach’s poetry, but her longstanding involvement in the arts, and her expectations of our swiftly evolving era.
I confess my worries about the digital recorder—that the air-conditioner is overpowering it, that I don’t know how to work it—and we begin. ...