Out of the Gate

About the Book

Drawing on poems composed between 1960 and 1970, Out of the Gate makes available for the first time a sampling of previously unpublished work by Ken Lauter, the author of fourteen previous books of poetry and a prose/poetry memoir of his experiences as an environmental activist, The Ratlue Diaries: Two Poets and the Rocking K War in Tucson Arizona (SFA Press, 2017). These early poems were originally assembled in three manuscripts: In Praise (which received a Hopwood Award for Poetry at the University of Michigan), Metronome, and New Light. Lauter, now seventy-four, looks back on these poems written in his late teens and early twenties with a combination of bemusement and awe, seeing them as raw and remote, as though written not by him but by a ghost-poet he can now barely recognize. (The ghost, in fact, makes a surprise appearance at the end of the book.) This collection includes love poems to his wife (a neuroscientist, photographer, and poet, Judith Lauter); an elegy for his father; anti-Vietnam War protests; meditations on the Apollo mission to the moon, as well as on the music of Mozart and Beethoven; and several longer narratives on a variety of themes.

About the Author

Lauter studied with Donald Hall (US Poet Laureate 2006-07) at the University of Michigan, and his work has been compared to Robert Lowell’s. Distinguished poet William Meredith has said that Ken’s poetry displays “a splendid and various gift.” He has received a Hopwood Award for poetry, an American Academy of Poets Prize, and a Shubert Playwriting Fellowship. He has taught literature and creative writing at four universities and also worked as a mayor’s aide, a university administrator, and a grass-roots environmental activist. Ken is married to poet, neuroscientist, and photographer Dr. Judy Lauter, author of How Is Your Brain Like a Zebra? — A New Human Neurotypology; Light from the Left – Poems on Paintings by Rembrandt; and seven books of haiku (all from Xlibris). Her most recent publication is Poet in the Park – Wallace Stevens in Elizabeth Park, Poems and Photographs. (Stephen F Austin University Press). Ken and Judy currently live in Nacogdoches, Texas.