Hum (Critical Overview)

Critical Overview

Lauterbach's "Hum," like most of her work, is considered by critics to exhibit a love of abstraction and language that is typical of postmodernism. Lauterbach's language is not difficult; both her words and most of her images are simple. Still, this simplicity belies the highly evolved nature of her work. As the poet James McCorkle wrote in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Lauterbach's poems "explore the most central of lyric and human conditions — eros, mortality, the coil of time, and the material of language." Other critics, however, have taken issue with her reliance on the tools of the New York School poets. D. H. Tracy, reviewing the collection Hum in the journal Poetry, first notes that the "New York School's approach, with its offhand radicalism has intense appeal," but he then avers that this type of "urbanity, taken too far, can become absurdity." Conversely, Shrode Hargis, writing of Hum in the Harvard Review, states that "Lauterbach thrives when she leads the reader through the catalogue of worlds that language makes possible."

Lauterbach herself states that "although I teach poetry all the time I have no idea how I would teach my own," as Eric Goldscheider of the Boston Globe quoted her as saying during a 1999 symposium at Bard College. She did, however, invite her readers "to participate in the making of meaning as an act of pleasure in the materiality of language." That is, Lauterbach expects readers to bring their own interpretation to her work; for her, a poem is a dialogue between reader and writer. Such a definition liberates critical response from being overly formal or concerned with traditional forms of explication.