Reading what writers who identify as poets say about verse can be waftish and atomized like verse itself. Straight talk doesn’t go with the territory. Richard Deming introduces the Poetry – March 2023 portfolio celebrating Ann Lauterbach with a 1-page amuse-bouche. He works references to Samuel Beckett and William Carlos Williams into his beginning:
In her work — fierce, complexly lyric — we see some of Beckett’s struggles with silence… In Lauterbach’s poems we catch sympathetic resonances of Williams’s insistence on particulars as the engine for esthetic insight.
Then he quotes a paragraph by Lauterbach herself, from her 2008 book of essays titled The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics of Experience. I’ll paraphrase it. She says loftily that the artist’s job is to “release materials” into a “middle ground” in order to connect with someone else, but also to foment awareness of people who are elsewhere, even far away. Something like that.
In his last paragraph, Professor Deming says this:
[Lauterbach’s] poems are, again and ever, an act of the mind testing the integrity — structural, moral — of the world.
In his finale he uses the word “wonder” 8 times, including this:
A wonder without sentimentality, a complex, difficult wonder that needs at last to be earned. A wonder like that.
Ending is a pirouette:
Did I say “wonder”? I meant “a world.” Ann Lauterbach means the world. Let’s put it that way. What else is there?
Make of it what you will. It’s starkly free of particulars about the work it introduces, which is just as well. What follows it is a flight of Lauterbach’s materials — a tray of versecraft specimens for the reader to roll on the tongue, earning his wonder.
(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
EthicalDative 
Try It My Way
Ladies and gentlemen (grant me this antiquated mode of address), we have much in common. We all have nipples. We all have equivalencies of kit in our genital wheelhouses. There’s a comical, often derisory cliché of the (rare) male striving to get, or be, in touch with his female side. There’s not a respectable female analog to it (I mean the cliché, not the reality) — i.e., the woman reaching into and connecting with her maleness — that I’m aware of.
Since creation, a lot of men have been abusive, murderous jackasses, often depriving the female half of humanity of agency, respect and self-realized fulfillment. I harbor suspicion that the snowballing nonbinary movement has been lent great momentum by accumulated disgust with self-serving, presumptuous, undeserved, enervating, theocratic male domination.
The nonbinary is an exclusionary mode, however. What about a “bilateral” alternative? Neither-male-nor-female could segue into Both-male-and-female, neither-ism not giving way to, but rather making way for, both-erism. On a personal note, I’ve always felt I have some woman in me and, like Binx Bolling, I seek the company of women. I embrace being somewhat of a bundle without putting dukes up about it. One grows into who one is, a nurture-minded father hen who keeps an orderly house.
Taxonomically, my doctrine of bilateral-ism versus nonbinary-ism may not be bullet-proof. I hear objection that “both” still implies only two. Some may insist that gender transcends arithmetic, that it’s infinitely multiple, that it occupies a sliding scale of finely nuanced gradation, or an idealized spectrum in which the colors meld one into the next without distinct boundaries. This position has metaphysical and visionary appeal; it’s dogmatically seductive and theoretically elegant.
I concede that bilateral-ism does make an implicit appeal to a bias founded in physical biology, which is that nature as we know it seems to produce in first instance (note how I hedge) only two versions of ourselves, with exceptional cases of the two combined. I contend, however, that both-erism as a mindset does not preclude a polylateralist mindset — call it all-erism. No problem; it’s a distinction without a difference for the moment, but it moves us closer to a sunny upland of positivity for which we, short only the apposite pronoun, badly long.
(c) 2023 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved