One Art

BY PROF. VAROL AKMAN

 

Rae Armantrout (b. 1947)
You can hold various elements of my poems in your mind at one time, but those elements may be hissing and spitting at one another.

According Ron Silliman, reading a book of poems by Rae Armantrout is analogous to "trying to drink a bowl of diamonds. What's inside is all so shiny & clear & even tiny that it appears perfectly do-able. But the stones are so hard & their edges so chiseled that the instant you begin they'll start to rip your insides apart."

Born on April 13, 1947, in a naval hospital in Vallejo, California, Rae Armantrout spent an inward-looking childhood, described delightfully in "True" (1998), her petite memoire. She enrolled at San Diego State University in 1965, planning to earn a degree in anthropology, but subsequently switching to English and American literature. Eventually, this led her to transfer to UC Berkeley, where she studied with Denise Levertov. There, she also made friends with Silliman, Lyn Hejinian and others who would in due course become known as the San Francisco group of "Language" poets. She graduated from Berkeley in 1970 and went on to obtain a master's degree from San Francisco State University in 1975. She is now a professor of writing and literature at the University of California, San Diego, where she started teaching many years ago.

A big note-taker, Armantrout always carries a journal. She estimates that 10 percent of her journals' contents make it into poems. The Stanford and UCSD libraries together archive a sizeable opus of Armantrout's, containing original manuscripts, correspondence and journals. (A poem written in kindergarten and deposited at UCSD is about a little fish.)

Armantrout's books of verse include "Extremities" (1978), "The Invention of Hunger" (1979), "Precedence" (1985), "Necromance" (1991), "Made To Seem" (1995), "The Pretext" (2001), "Veil: New and Selected Poems" (2001), "Up To Speed" (2004), "Next Life" (2007), "Versed" (2009) and "Money Shot" (2011). "Versed" received both the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2009 and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. The Critics Circle commended it for "experimental poetics but down-to-earth subject matter," which gave rise to poems that got better with each reading. The Pulitzer citation likened the poems to "little thought-bombs detonating in the mind long after the first reading."

I selected a deceptively simple piece from "Money Shot." It exhibits Armantrout's adeptness in addressing the tension between experiential bits (perceptions) and their poignant significance. The final two excerpts below may be handy in appreciating the exquisiteness of this minimalist poem.

> I was alone a lot when I was growing up. I was an only child and there was alcoholism in my family so I often wanted to stay out of the way. I think that has affected my work in a couple of ways. First, I tended to entertain myself by reading and writing. And then, of course, I was a lonely child. I think that original loneliness shows up in my poems. I often seem to be looking at things from a distance.

> I write in bits and pieces. Some of the pieces may be things I've seen in a commercial or heard in a popular song or read in a book about physics or neuroscience. Generally, wherever they come from, these pieces are things that make me say "Huh?" or WTF. I mix such found material, which may or may not be in quotes, and which may or may not be literally quoted, with material from my own thought processes and experiences.

> It's always exciting to find two things/images/ observations side by side that at first appear to have nothing to do with one another but which turn out, on second thought, to be somehow related. I think all of us Language poets … are interested in disjunction because we're interested in new forms of connection.

> I admire compression and I think that sometimes the words can mean more than one thing or the phrases can be taken more than one way, so that there might be, I hope, a kind of density of meaning within the phrase. I could … say that really I almost learned my craft early on from reading William Carlos Williams, whose work is also very condensed, and Emily Dickinson, whose work is tremendously condensed.

> Many of my poems … are written in separate sections that are divided perhaps by numbers or perhaps by asterisks, and they are separate moments or separate thoughts that are juxtaposed, and I'm interested in the juxtapositions and the kind of friction that bringing in material from diverse situations or disparate realms can create.

NOTE
The opening quote is from The Poetry Foundation website. I am indebted to Professor Armantrout for her permission to reprint "Exact." The excerpts also appear courtesy of the poet. The first two are from a 2010 interview by Daniel Benjamin, published in The Chicago Weekly blog. The third one is from a 2011 interview by Ben Lerner for BOMB Magazine. The last two are from a 2010 conversation with Jeffrey Brown, appearing in Art Beat, the PBS blog.

Exact

Quick, before you die,
describe

the exact shade
of this hotel carpet.

What is the meaning
of the irregular, yellow

spheres, some
hollow,

gathered in patches
on this bedspread?

If you love me,
worship

the objects
I have caused

to represent me
in my absence.

*
Over and over
tiers

of houses spill
pleasantly

down that hillside.
It

might be possible
to count occurrences.