Running after Rae Armantrout

When Rae Armantrout won the Pulitzer Prize for Versed (Wesleyan University Press, n.b. university press) I thought I'd better take a closer look at this poet's work because most of the time I don't know where she is going even as I devour each poem like a last meal. Truthfully, though, she makes my head hurt, not unlike how I feel trying to learn a foreign language, all tongue tied and brain fried.

In the April issue of Poetry Magazine, the editors wrote, "when we find ourselves puzzling over something in a poem or wondering why a particular choice was made, we can go straight to the source and put our poets on the spot..." which is exactly what they did. Thus each poem is followed by a q and a and Rae "spoke" which gave me something to really hang onto.

She begins her poem, Paragraph with:

Record breaking Thriller
dance attempt.

Poetry Magazine asks: The poem mentions Thriller and Michael Jackson (not specifically); what kind of music was in your mind -- if there was any --when composing the lines of this poem? How does music mark the passage of time for you, if it does?

R.A. replies: I seem to mention music occasionally in my poems, usually popular music. I'm interested in why certain things are popular. I also mention movies and television. "Record breaking Thriller/dance attempt" is a phrase I either read in a magazine or heard on TV --I can't remember which. The phrase struck me as somehow telling. "Record breaking" and "attempt" are actually rather sad qualifiers to the dance and the thrill. They abstract the possible experience. I think the whole poem deals with the way in which experience is mediated, the ways in which we have "para" experience.

Dan Chiasson's piece in The New Yorker (May 17th, 2010) asks, "So who is Rae Armantrout? The author, for starters, of some tantalizingly hard poems, poems that sometimes track their own difficulty:

Wrapped strands and

What passes

for messages,

what pulls itself

apart to flash,

the twinkle
or tickle
of articulation

In these lines from her poem, Passing, the play is both sonic (twinkle, articulation) and semantic (What pulls itself apart to flash? For one thing, a flasher's raincoat!). It keeps everything in motion -- never "passed," always "passing"--and replaces forms of settled identity with processes, open-ended, repeatable, of doing and undoing."

Chiasson writes, "Though the results looked radical, in a way Language poetry (a school Rae was often associated with) was oddly conservative. It put poetry, of all things, at the very center of culture. These poets suggested that, if you wanted to change the circuitry of the culture, you had to go to poetry, where the wires were. There all damage done to language by advertisers and politicians could be undone. But, lest poets become faux finishers, they wanted to keep those innards of language exposed, rather than tuck them back inside a consistent speaker whom we get to know, and come to like or to despise, as we read. Poetry shouldn't reveal the soul of a unique individual: there's no such thing as a unique individual."

This was all extremely helpful especially in toto and gave me a bit more understanding of a poet whose voice is so different from my own. Chiasson spoke for me with, "As in fly-fishing, as in illness, so in Armantrout's poems: one is on the hook."