Hum (Historical Context)

Historical Context

Postmodernism

Lauterbach's writing, including "Hum," is firmly grounded in the postmodern tradition. Postmodernism evolved primarily after World War II, when writers and artists declined to restrict themselves to the confines of form and structure that had defined artistic expression in previous generations. By definition, postmodernism is a continuation of modernism, which was itself a primarily twentieth-century artistic movement that influenced music, literature, and the visual arts by challenging accepted cultural norms. In terms of poetry, modernism was marked by the work of W. H. Auden, one of Lauterbach's acknowledged influences. The postmodernists continued to develop the avant garde in the arts by becoming even more experimental in their work.

Many postmodernists created works of music, poetry, and painting that were deemed "minimalist" because of their stripped-down, elemental style. In music, the postmodernist composer John Cage created a composition that does not require any instrument to play a single note. "Color field" painters such as Mark Rothko created large canvases made up of solid squares of single colors, and writers such as Raymond Carver penned stories in which meaning is derived from what does not happen or from what happens in multiple ways. Lauterbach's poems, including "Hum," can be considered postmodernist because of her frequent use of repetition, short lines, simple language, and fragmentary images.

The Impact of September 11

On the morning of September 11, 2001, almost three thousand people died in near-simultaneous terrorist attacks in which four domestic passenger airplanes were hijacked and crashed into the World Trade Center, in New York; the Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia; and a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania. The country, and indeed the world, was stunned by the events, which marked the first time the United States had been attacked on its home soil since Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941. Unlike Pearl Harbor, however, millions of people saw much of the events of September 11 on live television, thus themselves witnessing the enormity and severity of the attacks and the loss of innocent lives. Collectively, the raw emotions evoked by the attacks engendered an unprecedented feeling of national mourning. This feeling of overwhelming disquietude is what Lauterbach explores in "Hum," wherein "everyone weeps," and "the towers are incidental."

Lauterbach, who was then living and working in New York City, first published "Hum" in 2005, four years after the terrorist attacks took place and the subsequent so-called war on terror, as led by the United States, had become mired in political controversy. However, "Hum" is not concerned with the perpetrators of the attacks or with how the nation responded; rather, Lauterbach focuses solely on an individual's visceral reaction to a sky filled with ashes. Many artists and poets created works in response to these attacks. The philosopher Arthur C. Danto, in an essay published in ArtNet magazine, writes of the possibility of the art world's responding to the tragedy:

By day's end the city was transformed into a ritual precinct, dense with improvised sites of mourning. I thought at the time that artists, had they tried to do something in response to 9/11, could not have done better than the anonymous shrine-makers who found ways of expressing the common mood and feeling of those days, in ways that everyone instantly understood.

In the years that followed, the images and memory of September 11, 2001, became part of the American consciousness and permeated all aspects of society. One year later, An Eye for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind: Poets on 9/11, an anthology of poems inspired by the disaster, was published by Regent Press, while Poetry after 9/11: An Anthology of New York Poets was published by Melville House.