Ann Lauterbach

I met Stacy in the mid-1980s, when I taught for a semester at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She was my student, as was her future husband, Chet Weiner. The three of us formed a kind of molecule, moving across the snowy Iowa City landscape and into the spring. My sister Jennifer had died the year before, and I was still shaken; their company felt like a kind of blessing.

Stacy was smart, curious, and had a knack for appreciation and effortless kindness; she was beautiful, with an uncanny voice, subtly muted and musical; her intensity created an aura of exotic mystery. Her poems were all phenomenology and oblique shift. She seemed to want to write the wind. We watched Breathless. We were in thrall to the poems of Michael Palmer. From Connecticut, but already traveled, already on a quest, she seemed to be in the process of self-invention. This took will, and wit, and love, and a kind of radical intransigence, all of which she had in quantity. And something else was already in place; an essential joyful appetite, free from acquisitiveness. Objects did not move her; they got in the way of her senses. Her fine intelligence was deeply embedded in a creaturely connection to the natural world; taste, touch, sight.