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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.

Donna Hilbert, Threnody

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THRENODY: POEMS, Donna Hilbert. Moon Tide Press, 6709 Whittier, CA 90608, 2022, 102 pages, $15 paper, www.moontidepress.com.

ESSAYS ONE, Lydia Davis. Picador, 120 Broadway, New York 10271, 2019, 528 pages, $30 paper, picadorusa.com.

While reading poems this month, and blogging each day, I have also been reading Lydia Davis’s Essays One, a gift from a friend. She said, “You must read ‘Thirty Recommendations for Good Writing Habits,” so I did, and now I am reading the whole fat book from the beginning. This week, I am stuck at Davis’s essay, “Fragmentary or Unfinished: Barthes, Joubert, Hölderlin, Mallarmé, Flaubert.”

Of course, any book, and any piece of writing, is already part of a cooperative. It is, in itself as printed on the page, incomplete. It requires a reader to complete it. But the reader may also misunderstand it, distort it in favor of another idea, forget large parts of it, misremember it, create something different in misremembering it, etc. All these responses are perfectly legitimate parts of the cooperative act. (Davis, p. 204)

It strikes me that all poems are, by definition, fragmented. Too densely written, too explanatory, they tip over into prose. (One of my own dangers, in writing narrative poems.) While reading Donna Hilbert’s poetry, Davis’s words have hung over me and made me wonder where I’m not being equal to the task. Consider this, the shortest poem in the book:

Grief

In the dishwasher,
nothing but spoons.

—Donna Hilbert

And consider Davis’s insight into uses of the fragment, the fragmented:

…when I think of the fragment, old or new—it is a text that works with silence, ellipsis, abbreviation, suggesting that something is missing, but that has the effect of a complete experience. (Davis, p. 208)

Hilbert has a big job, writing about grief. Again, I think of Lydia Davis. In this passage she  quotes Barthes: “incoherence is preferable to a distorting order” (p. 220), then continues to comment on Mallarmé’s book after the death of his son, A Tomb for Anatole:

The notes become the most immediate expression, the closest mirroring, of the writer’s emotion at the inspiring subject, the writer’s stutter, and the reader, witnessing the writer’s stutter, is witness not only to his grief but also to his process, to the workings of his mind, closer to what we might think of as the origins of his writing. (Davis, p.221)

This is what I think Hilbert is doing throughout Threnody, deliberately conveying a fragmenting experience. I first caught sight of this book on the publisher’s website, and both the title and cover leapt out at me, threnody, meaning lament. As I was trying to cobble together a book of poems about my childhood, and the loss of my parents, I felt Hilbert’s book would be of help.

It turns out that Hilbert is lamenting many things (as are we all), and though her husband’s death looms (“looms” is the wrong verb), she is also writing about the pandemic, about a stand of trees that shelter a heronry, about children leaving home, about her (our) own inevitable aging. A few of the poems are longer, and, on a first reading, had more of an impact on me. But when I began rereading the poems this morning, the shorter poems got their due. Here is another example:

Gratitude

For the brown pelican
diving into morning ocean,
I thank you, Rachel Carson.

—Donna Hilbert

If you encounter this poem all on its own, it seems true, of course (don’t we agree?), but … it’s hardly enough. In the context of this particular book, however, where things and people are lost who will never come back, where birds weave in and out of many of the poems, it fits like a piece of a jigsaw puzzle and helps create the whole. Or, do I mean “the whole”? Words fail me. It takes a sympathetic reader to fill in the gaps. I think that’s the point. 

I have been trying to write this review all day, and it (certainly) is not enough. Let me leave you with one of Hilbert’s longer poems.

Walking the Palo Alto Marshes in My Red Coat

Say mud flat, salt marsh, bittern, egret.
Say egret without thinking regret
one letter away.

Say morning is a gift.
Say the mud flat is a silver tray.
Say birds sing like an orchestra tuning.

I am looking for a prayer.
I am walking for the saving incantation.
I am working at metaphor.

Say blackbird.
Say red wings like epaulets of blood.
Say heart: red four-chambered room.

Say womb, breast, cradle, boat.
Say desire.
Say desire: dark and fathomless,

the iris of an eye, your eye, the sea.
Say desire,
which is the boat.

I am wearing my red coat against the cold.

—Donna Hilbert

In short, the first time I read Threnody, several months ago, it didn’t have much impact. My re-reading of it, today, felt much different, and I’m grateful I decided to circle back to it.

Donna Hilbert has several books, and is the subject of a documentary about her work and life, Grief Becomes Her: A Love Story. To read about Donna Hilbert, check out her personal website. You can listen to a poem from one of her previous books on The Writer’s Almanac, here.