Style & Culture |

Opening a ’space of unnerving honesty and complexity’

Rae Armantrout delights writing series with original poetry

By Catie Joyce

Posted on Monday, April 22nd, 2002, 12:00 am

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Poet Rae Armantrout delighted last Thursday’s New Writing Series audience with poetry that Ann Vickery described in “Dictionary of Literary Bibliography” as “renowned for its sharp social observation combined with an eloquent and often sparse lyricism.” Armantrout held true to that description throughout her reading.

“Ever alert to the repetition-compulsions that structure a still all too theocratic and patriarchal society, Armantrout’s poetry affords us a small, but inexhaustible, distance from the ‘corporate-funded homunculi’ with ‘bar-code hard-ons,’” Steve Evans, coordinator of the New Writing Series, said in his introduction of Armantrout, quoting one of her poems. “The space she opens is one of unnerving honesty and complexity, but also of dream-logic liberties and lucid release.”

Armantrout read mostly from her new book of selected poems, “Veil” (Wesleyan University Press, 2001), which included poems from previous books such as “Necromance,” (Sun and Moon Press, 1991) “The Pretext,” (Green Integer, 2001) and “Made to Seem” (Sun and Moon Press, 1995). She read her poems with animation and such a light touch that the audience was not burdened by the heaviness of her words but instead could enjoy her playful phrases.

In reading, she gave equal weight to such lines as “Die Mommy Scum!” a phrase she stole from her son when he was younger, and the preceding lines, “To come true,/a thing must come second,” in “The Creation.”

Armantrout has a way of molding her poems from her everyday observations.

“I write slowly,” she said in one of her visits to an English class. “I compile material. I carry a blank book around with me. My longer poems are collaged and collected.”

She said one poem may combine observations from looking at the newspaper, reading a book on philosophy and looking out the window.

One poem, called “Solid,” from her latest manuscript, reads almost like newscast headlines: “Nude activists find out the law/has them covered,” also quoting the song title “That’s the night when the lights went out in Georgia.”

“That was written during the presidential elections when I was afraid Bush would win, and he did,” she said. “And ‘the night when the lights went out in Georgia,’ that was of course Dan Rather. He’s got a way with words, as we all know,” Armantrout joked.

Armantrout has often fallen under the label of “language” poet. This is a mode of poetics that emerged in the 1970s. “It was influenced by the way language was used in the Vietnam War,” Armantrout said. “You couldn’t trust the way language was used in public discourse,” she said, speaking specifically of the government’s messages to the public about the war.

Writers of that era responded to this by questioning language. “Language is something you want to interrogate,” she said.

Her poems evolve through their words.

In “Birthmark: The Pretext” she begins with an introduction to a dream narrative poem she “recently abandoned” called “Mark,” ending with the stanza “Suddenly, I’m a teacher./I see a line of Milton’s./I’m glad I haven’t marked it wrong;/at first I thought it didn’t fit.”

Then the poem moves into a prose poem and she describes a birthmark on her left thigh: “When I was a child, my mother referred to it as a ’strawberry mark’ . Because of what she called it the mark has never troubled me.” The word “birthmark” then moves the poet into her next idea: “But gender is the birthmark which has bothered me,” where she describes society’s perceptions of femininity through Marilyn Monroe. “When I was a child Marilyn Monroe was the Sex Queen . Those unwieldy bosoms held together by the weak ’spaghetti straps.’ Tee-hee. Something was inadequate. The squeaky little girl voice would never be able to articulate all that matter . So she would be a stranger to herself.”

Armantrout often drew from childhood and present-day personal experiences in her poetry. She grew up in San Diego, Calif., and was the only child of a fundamentalist-Christian mother and a U.S. naval chief father. She went to San Diego State University and the University of California, Berkeley, where she received her B.A. degree in English. She received a master’s degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University.

Armantrout currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego.

At one point in the reading Armantrout said “it strikes me that a lot of these poems are really Southern California. It’s so different from what you know in Maine.”

Although we may not have been able to identify with everything in Armantrout’s poetry, it attracted the audience because it pulled from every aspect of our modern-day society in such a way as to startle us. At moments she had us laughing at society, at ourselves, at other moments she had us questioning it.

Evans described another reading of hers he attended in 1996.

“When she had finished, one acquaintance turned to me and said the phrase would have struck me under most other circumstances as hyperbolic, but it rang true that night ‘That’s it! That’s the point! Does it make you want to live’ From his voice, it was clear that Armantrout had driven him to answer with an emphatic yes.”