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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.

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/.

In the Hour of War: Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry

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Despite my best intentions, I am not going to get a book of poems read today. A few days, ago, however, I came across this review, at Lithub.com, of a new anthology of contemporary Ukrainian poetry, edited by Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky. The review is well worth reading, and the book? One more I am going to have to buy.

In the Hour of War: Carolyn Forché and Ilya Kaminsky on Contemporary Ukrainian Poetry