How to Behold Rae Armantrout

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WOBBLE, Rae Armantrout. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 06459, 2018, 160 pages, $14.95 paper, www.wesleyan.edu/wespress.

PARTLY: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS, 2001-2015, Rae Armantrout. Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT 06459, 2018, 252 pages, $19.95 paper, www.wesleyan.edu/wespress.

Rae Armantrout has published more than two dozen books of poetry, one of which, Versed, won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize. Her Wobble (2018) was a finalist for The National Book Award. She is credited as one of the founders of the West Coast group of Language poets, and, though I am not usually drawn to what Jane Hirshfield calls L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets, Armantrout keeps crossing my radar. I decided to regard that crossing as an invitation, and get to know her better.

I went to hear Armantrout at a local library. I read reviews. A friend—a Dickinson scholar—asked me if I had read Armantrout’s poems. Flicker of interest, flame turned higher. Whatever was going on here, I wanted to pay attention and not miss it.

If sadness
is akin to patience,

we’re back!

Pattern recognition
was our first response

to loneliness.

(from “Upper World,” in Partly)

My willingness to explore, not only Armantrout, but language poetry in general, or maybe what some call “concrete” poetry—where words and very short lines set in white space take on a structural or sculptural quality—began to shift for me a couple of years ago, when Kathryn Rantala of Ravenna Books edited my Dickinson poems, and pushed her “more minimalist” agenda. The editing process (Rantala’s suggestions, my push-back, our compromises, my constant checking-in with Dickinson) taught me what can be left out of a poem, yet leave the poem still standing. That intrigued me.

And the Dickinson connection is important. I found this in the Boston Review:

William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson together taught Armantrout how to dismantle and reassemble the forms of stanzaic lyric—how to turn it inside out and backwards, how to embody large questions and apprehensions in the conjunctions of individual words, how to generate productive clashes from arrangements of small groups of phrases. From these techniques, Armantrout has become one of the most recognizable, and one of the best, poets of her generation. —Stephanie Burt

There’s also this comment from Lydia Davis in “A Close Look at Two Books by Rae Armantrout” (Essays One,):

[Armantrout’s imagery] draws fully from the well of America and all it has to offer—the American childhood, the American family, the American holiday, the American landscape, the American city, the American culture, American television, and the American language.

Lydia Davis also calls Armantrout’s poems “compact” and “clear.” And, as the quote above points out, part of the humor is that it is drawn from our highly ironic, fragmented capitalist world. Given that it’s an election year, even more reason to keep looking.

I will confess up front that it took me a while to reach even the place where I wanted to “get” Rae Armantrout’s poetry; I’m not sure, even now, that I’m all the way there. But I didn’t want to let my resistance—to poetry that doesn’t (like mine) tell a story and lean on imagery to make its point—stand in my way.

I found her 2018 book, Wobble, at the library; a friend passed along Partly to me. The real turning point came when I heard Armantrout at a local reading, an intimate café setting. In short, I finally felt myself falling through the lines, into the poetry—and the humor. It’s all in the voice:

Clouds, conjoined
and tattered,

freely budding,
unbeholden

(from “Life History,” Wobble)

In such a poem, every word must matter. “Conjoined,” makes me think of conjoined twins (shouldn’t it?) but then they tatter, then the clouds are “freely budding” like an apple tree in spring. “Unbeholden” can mean no one’s looking (except we are looking), but it can also mean not in debt to anyone, without obligation. They are conjoined like twins, but only at first, then tattering off on whatever path they care to take. The poem unfolds less on the page than in the reader’s imagination.

It’s not a subtitle, but on the back cover of Wobble, there’s a heading (in the same style as the title) that could be a subtitle: POEMS WRITTEN ON THE SHIFTING GROUND OF IMMINENT COLLAPSE. It’s not that she has become completely opaque for me, but at a certain juncture I suddenly began to understand that the opaqueness of these poems is intentional. As she writes in “My Pleasure”: “It is my pleasure / and my privilege / not to understand this.”

If Armantrout isn’t for everyone, I am willing to bet she doesn’t intend to be. (She’s been too busy writing.) Hers is a wry, often tongue-in-cheek sort of voice. Poet and NYer reviewer Dan Chiasson sees this, too:

[Armantrout] takes the basic premises of Language writing somewhere that they were never intended to go: toward the mapping of a single individual’s extraordinary mind and uniquely broken heart.

I wish I could do more here, but the real trick to all this was attending her reading at Redmond’s SoulFood Café that made her voice, her wit, her humor click into place. I have not read (yet) all of Partly, but I’ve been searching for this fragment, heard (not seen): “Thought is a washed pot.”

In these bloggish reviews, I like to include at least one poem in its entirety. So, in part because have a box of rented Mason bees which I’ve been keeping an eye on, in part because I think this is a poem about time (which I’ve been struggling with), I’ll share this poem:

Bees

If not being (something)
is the same as being,

then I will live forever.

—

Round shadows inside
the sunflower’s

corona.

—

If I lived forever
would the present’s noose

be looser?

—

Moon shadow made of
angry bees

confined. Come in.

—Rae Armantrout (from Wobble)

It (it?) might be made of angry bees), but Armantrout invites us to behold.

To explore more about Armantrout on your own, take a look at Ilya Kaminsky’s essay, which asks, “Who is this poet channeling?” She is of course profiled at Poetry Foundation and all over the Web.

My Poem at Verse Daily

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I’m thrilled to have a poem from The Pear Tree featured (today!) at Versedaily.org. (The link will take you to my poem.)

There are a number of poem-a-day sites on the Internet now, and I subscribe to a bunch of them. Poetry Daily and Verse Daily were the forerunners of this trend, and it’s an honor, in any case, to have a poem of mine plucked out of the many. Please take a look!

If you click on my name, you’ll find several more poems of mine scattered across the web, including “In Praise of Bread” at Amethyst — a publication I somehow lost track of. And, early on a Sunday morning, there’s an appropriateness in sending you to it, so:

https://amethystmagazine.org/2023/11/06/praise-bread-a-poem-by-bethany-reid/

It has been a crazy-busy week, and (though the Reid-daughter birthdays are finally over for the month), next week is looking no better for this July Mom. But, yes, I am still reading a poetry book each week, and writing about it. This week you can find my review of Matt Hohner’s At the Edge of a Thousand Years (a prize-winner from Jacar Press) at Escape Into Life (EIL).

What else am I reading? About 3 (or 4?) novels at once, which is normal for me. I’m reading a book of poems (of course, more to be revealed when I get the chance). And I’m reading a craft book, Grant Faulkner’s The Art of Brevity, which leaps from astonishment to astonishment. I’ve underlined practically the whole thing.

 

 

 

Adam Zagajewski, TRUE LIFE

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TRUE LIFE, Adam Zagajewski, trans. Clare Cavanaugh. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 120 Broadway, New York 10271, 2019, 80 pages, $16 paper, www.fsgbooks.com.

I have been a fan of Adam Zagajewski’s poetry ever since his “Try to Praise the Mutilated World” appeared in the New Yorker the week after 9/11. I bought his selected poems, Without End (2002), some time ago, and on a visit to Phinney Books during this spring’s Independent Bookstore fest, I picked up this slim book of his late poems. It was published in Polish before his death (his dates are 1945-2021), and only recently appeared in this gorgeous translation by Clare Cavanaugh. It is full of delights.

Figs

Figs are sweet, but don’t last long.
They spoil fast in transit,
says the shopkeeper.
Like kisses, adds his wife,
a hunched old woman with bright eyes.

—Adam Zagajewski

Each week, I tell myself to 1) read a book of poems, and 2) share a brief appreciation and a poem—easy, peasy, right? So far I’ve been unsuccessful. For this blogpost, I ended up doing a deep dive into all-things Zagajewski (pronounced Zaga yef ski). As people say, “I went down the rabbit hole,” and I have spent most of the day there. Now I’m back, not to drag you down with me, but to point the way for your own exploration.

For one thing, I learned that who Zagajewski was goes beyond the stock, “one of the most beloved poets in the world,” “the acclaimed Polish poet,” as he is usually introduced. Born in Lvov, Poland, as I had previously read, he moved as an infant with his family to Western Poland.

Well, yes, but so much more that that.

Lvov, Poland, is now Lviv, Ukraine. When the borders of Poland were redrawn after WWII, Zagajewski and his family, along with many other Poles, were forcibly moved (a journey of two weeks, in cattle cars—Adam was four months old) to the German city, Gliwice, which had been ceded to Poland. Given Adam’s tender age, being in exile, being a refugee, may not have marked him as such, but Adam’s forebears were unwilling to cede their geographical identity. Writing a tribute to his friend, Ilya Kaminsky quotes a few passages from Zagajewski’s memoir, Two Cities, and explains the title’s significance:

In Gliwice, Adam’s father, an engineering professor, couldn’t afford a desk. Instead, he nailed four metal food cans to a small table, where he piled book after book about Lvov. For decades, he kept buying maps and guidebooks to the city. As if Lvov existed. As if he could simply return.

–Ilya Kaminsky

I share all of this to explain how another of Zagajewski’s significant poems, “To Go to Lvov,” suddenly bloomed into full-color life for me. (Kaminsky’s essay, “Going to Lvov: A Poet of the Human Soul,” appeared in The Yale Review; it contains this poem and others, and you can find it here: https://yalereview.org/article/going-to-lvov.)

Zagajewski, in his memoir, also writes of walking, as a boy, with his grandfather through the streets of their adopted city. “I walked the streets of Gliwice. He walked the streets of Lvov” (qtd. by Kaminsky). Somehow it seems fitting that in many of the poems in True Life, the poet takes us along on his walks through old European cities, haunted by the past:

Santiago de Compostela

Light drizzles as if the Atlantic
were examining its conscience

November no longer pretends
Rain dowsed its bonfires and sparks

Santiago is Spain’s secret capital
Patrols arrive day and night

Pilgrims wander its streets, exhausted
or eager, like ordinary tourists

A woman sat by the cathedral
she leaned on her backpack and sobbed

The pilgrimage is over
Where will she go now

Cathedrals are only stones
Stones don’t know motion

Evening approaches
and winter.

—Adam Zagajewski

I have to emphasize how he employs these strange comparisons, surprising, opaque images:

Light drizzles as if the Atlantic
were examining its conscience

Sometimes even stranger:

When night draws near
the mountains are clear and pure
—like a philosophy student
before exams
(from “Mountains”)

In “Kardamyli” (a town in Greece, given in 146 BC by the Roman emperor to the Spartans), Zagajewski asks, “What can a person who is a poet do— / in the army, a hospital, the world?

My answer: one could do worse than write these poems. As Kaminsky shares:

Adam insisted that a poem can be both an elegy for what happened and also a hymn to life. He gave us, if not a healing, then a way to go on, to give each other a measure of reprieve, music, and gentleness.

—Ilya Kaminsky, “Going to Lvov: A Poet of the Human Soul” (The Yale Review, May 6, 2021)

“[A]n elegy for what happened and also a hymn to life.” Just gorgeous.

You can learn more about Zagajewski, and find videos of him being interviewed or reading, all over the Internet. Obviously, I recommend Kaminsky’s essay. And, if you don’t know his poem, “Try to Praise the Mutiliated World,” please (please) visit this page to find it.

You can also find it at this blogpost from last year: https://www.bethanyareid.com/adam-zagajewski-1945-1921/.

Sandra Noel, WHAT THE PAIN LEFT

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WHAT THE PAIN LEFT, Sandra Noel. Kelsay Books, 502 South 1040 East, A-119, American Fork, Utah 84003, 2024, 56 pages, $20 paper, Kelsaybooks.com.

Although it is always a pleasure to read poems by Vashon Island poet Sandra Noel, this book felt very different from the two I have previously reviewed, Hawk Land (2022) and The Gypsy in My Kitchen  (2015). Dedicated to her husband, who died in 2022, What the Pain Left is painted from a different palette. Though crafted with Noel’s eye for detail, her heart for nature, here the “commotion / of silver-scaled abundance / falling from nets” in “Love and Marriage,” feels doomed from the start. In “We Speak About Death Over Burgers and Fries.” I was amazed at Noel’s poise in navigating the trajectory of this book, encompassing a 40-year history: courtship to death and out the other side, alone.

I will catch you
or we will fall together
maybe there is another level
in this warren
a way out of the labyrinth.

end lines from “Down the Rabbit Hole”

Of course there is no other way out of life, and perhaps that’s why the poems are often spare, more spare than I’ve noticed in Noel’s previous books. They are tender with feeling, and accessible; for the most part, Noel omits punctuation, placing together lines about a heron abruptly with “tragedies / float noisily by” (“In the Shadows”). Unexpected capital letters intrude, and exclamation marks. All of which seem to be insisting on making sense of what feels senseless, an illness, ineffectual treatment, and untimely death. This praise from the back cover, felt apt:

Part diary, part love letter, Noel’s humor, gratitude, and self-awareness keep these poems honest and truly from the heart. –Katy E. Ellis

The cover art is by Sandra Noel, herself, a watercolor painting of Gaibo Whaling Station, Wadaura, Chiba Prefecture, Japan. In the poem, “Love and Marriage,” the whaling station provides a metaphor—at least, so I thought—for the messiness of life:

Love and Marriage

Every morning
we walked to the whaling station
bought hot sweet coffee in cans
from a machine on the street
too early for the sun but not the market
as vendors shoveled crushed ice
into large blue bins
and elegant fishing boats glided
alongside the dock
their holds full and ready to disgorge.

As we sipped our coffee
arm in arm
I listened to the talk of local women
understanding nothing
and everything as women do.

Then I saw your sea blue eyes
bright with promise
the same way you looked at me
gazing over that commotion
of silver-scaled abundance
falling from nets onto the dock
into the waiting bins of ice
and hopeful buyers with their yen
fish sorted from fish
squid, octopus, sea squirts
and smaller, even stranger creatures.

You pushed me forward
when the crowd thinned out
kneeling, picked up wriggling globs
telling me their scientific names
as my eyes wandered to seabirds
frenzied by the blood and entrails
where women cleaned fish in seawater
then, over your beautiful shoulders
to the sea, bright blue
the great Eastern Sun slowly rising
turning the bay into liquid gold.

“Are you listening to me!?”
“Yes,” I said, “Yes of course!”
and when I think of that first lie
I remember all the others
the kind that make a marriage work
but destroy a love affair.

—Sandra Noel

Notice how the lack of punctuation makes some lines ambiguous. Is it the local women who understand nothing, as women do? or is it the I, listening, who understands nothing? The latter interpretation makes, “Then I saw your sea blue eyes” a kind of homecoming, a moment of pure understanding. That the poem’s ending feels unresolved, or imperfectly resolved (going on a couple beats too long, or cut short?), is a simulacrum of a life ended too soon, and part of what makes this collection of poems so moving.

You can learn more by visiting Noel’s website, Noel Design. Or visit her book page at Kelsay Books.