Rae Armantrout
Books of her Poetry (alphabetical).
Books of her Prose (alphabetical).
Time Line.
'Control' began with the experience of learning (or trying to learn) to meditate. The first stanza reproduces the instructor's advice that we should 'set obtrusive thoughts aside.' The third, fifth, and eighth stanzas develop my response to this experience while the second, fourth, sixth, and seventh stanzas present the obtrusive thoughts as fragments of the debris field of American media culture. |
I invited a professor of astrophysics at UC San Diego, Brian Keating, to lunch, hoping he could help me understand the origin of matter in the early universe. The poem is not a transcript of our conversation, but rather an absurdist account of my attempts to visualize what Brian was saying. At times it takes the form of two voices, one correcting the other. Such visualizations and corrections could go on indefinitely. |
The poem spins out of that standard description of an exoticized erotic dancer [in a partly heard Duran Duran song]. It proceeds to run some of the changes on the always complex relationship between sex and power. |
'Framing' was composed on a beautiful day in an especially wet year in San Diego (2005). The unusually dry hills were 'articulated' by or with flowers, and migrating butterflies swarmed everywhere. I had recently learned of Robert Creeley's death. It seemed like a particularly lousy day on which to be dead. |
Part of the pleasure of poetry has always been the rather strange pleasure of 'calling one thing by another's name.' That's what metaphor does, after all. 'Scumble' asks about the psychology of this phenomenon. What is the kick in substitution? Is it covertly erotic? |
in two sections, each dealing with the relation of language to the self. Each begins pretty reasonably and becomes less sensible as it proceeds. The last three lines may (or may not) gesture toward 'the lyric.' |
is about the experience of time — the ways in which we try and fail to grasp it. The Sphinx's question to Oedipus ... is really about the nature of time. His clever answer ('man') leads him, well, you know where. |
like many of my poems, is written in three quasi-independent sections [separated by asterisk]. Each ... has a different context, literally refers to a different situation. What interests me is the way that such separate parts can interpenetrate (affect/inflect) on another. The first section is a take on the Garden of Eden story. The second might be located in a hotel where a pair of kinky lovers meet. I'm interested in seeing what sparks fly when such scenarios bump into each other. |
Aphoristic Wit (1995).
Blog entry. |
Couverture (1991).
Selected translations into French. |
Extremities (1978). |
The Invention of Hunger (1979) |
Itself (2015).
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21 poems from Itself are included in Partly: new and selected poems, 2001-2015.
Just Saying (2013).
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Made To Seem (1995).
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Money Shot (2011). |
Necromance (1991).
Blog entry. |
Next Life (2007). |
Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2015 (2016). |
Includes:
The Pretext (2001). |
Precedence (1985). |
Up to Speed (2004). |
Veil: New and Selected Poems (2001). |
Versed (2009).
Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Blog entry. |
Here, as with many of her other poems, it takes effort to untangle the topic unless the poet gives you more of a hint than is in the work. Her comments in Best American Poetry annuals are helpful to nudge open a door on some of her process and intentions.
The inner book cover includes:
Rae Armantrout has always organized her collections of poetry as though they were works in themselves. Versed brings two of these sequences together, offering readers an expanded view of the arc of her writing. The poems in the first section, 'Versed', play with vice and versa, the perversity of human consciousness. They flirt with error and delusion, skating on a thin ice that inevitably cracks: 'Metaphor forms / a crust / beneath which / the crevasse / of each experience.' 'Dark Matter', the second section, alludes to more than the unseen substance thought to make up the majority of the mass in the universe. The invisible and unknowable are confronted directly as Armantrout's experience with cancer marks these poems with a new austerity, shot through with her signature wit and stark unsentimental thinking. Together the poems of Versed part us from our assumptions about reality, revealing the gaps and fissures in our emotional and linguistic constructs, showing us ourselves where we are most exposed. |
The lines are usually short (one to five words) and the stanzas also are short (mainly one to three lines). The book is in two halves, its title poem being the second in its half:
Versed | Dark Matter | |
Number of poems | 43 | 44 |
Number of poem pages | 62 | 67 |
Poems with 1-to-3 lines per stanza | 32 | 34 |
Poems with 2 numbered sections | 8 | 12 |
Poems with 3 numbered sections | 3 | 4 |
Poems with 4 numbered sections | 2 | 1 |
Poems with 2 asterisk-separated sections | 2 | 7 |
Poems with 3 asterisk-separated sections | 12 | 8 |
Poems with 4 asterisk-separated sections | 5 | 1 |
Poems with 5 asterisk-separated sections | 2 | 1 |
Poems with 6 asterisk-separated sections | 1 | 0 |
Poems with 8 asterisk-separated sections | 1 | 0 |
Poems with extra spaces denoting sections | 2 | 0 |
Poems with titled sections | 0 | 1 |
Poems in a single section | 5 | 7 |
Includes a prose poem | 7 | 4 |
Part is double-spaced (or a sequence of 1-line stanzas) | 4 | 6 |
No period at close of poem | 27 | 12 |
Number of poems | 43 | 44 |
writing the plot about sets (1998).
Chapbook. |
Collected Prose (2007). |
True (1998). |
Books of Poetry Form. Alphabetic list of poetry forms and related topics. Poetry Home. |
Copyright © 2006-2016 by
J. Zimmerman, except for the quoted prose & poems.
All rights reserved. |