Rae Armantrout's Poetry

I’ve been a fan of Rae Amantrout’s poetry for years, so I was excited to see Versed as a finalist for the National Book Award. I’ve had a close relationship with this book this year, as I was starting to write a review of it for Jacket, when Rae Armantrout chose my poems for the Boston Review contest. My friends told me it wouldn’t do her book service to have me publish a review of it right after my poems chosen by her came out in Boston Review. After a little bit of thinking (I’d already started the review . . .), I realized they were right. I also realized I could easily toss parts of the review up here on my blog. So here goes. This was the basic approach I was going to take:

Rae Armantrout’s poetry enacts a doubled vision, as it turns both outwardly to the things and events of the world, and inwardly, to the closeness of human desire and being. Or, perhaps said a better way, she brings a “direct treatment of the thing” as straight-on and direct as I’ve ever seen. The things of her poems are the things of the world, and of being in the world. The was a caveat of after “direct treatment of the thing,” in the Imagist directives, and I think this is where Armantrout’s work can be seen as a unification of tendencies, the caveat goes: be it “objective or subjective.” This “objective or subjective” bit is where Armantrout is truly amazing, as her poems tend to change this “or” to “and,” existing as both objective and subjective, in a constant state of assertion and interrogation. This makes for a richly complex perspective, one teetering at the very brink of elusiveness, a vantage point of seeing and saying that is truly hers alone.

And here’s one of the poems to which I was going to want to pay attention:


Anchor


“Widely expected,
if you will,
cataclysm.”

Things I’d say,
am saying,

to persons no longer
present.

Yards away trim junipers
make their customary
bows.

“Oh, no thank you”
to any of it.

If you watch me
from increasing distance,

I am writing this
always


*


People are often talking about Armantrout as a funny poet. That her poems are funny. Sometimes her poems are funny, yes, but I think it’s in poems where she’s anything but funny, that her achievement can be seen most clearly. How she can be both objective and subjective at once, as in the above poem, where yes, if one were to recede from the scene of her writing at the speed of light, one could theoretically remain in the presence of her writing this. It incorporates wit, yes, but it's as chilling as it is funny.

This same sort of objective clarity can be seen in this poem:


Around


Time is placed
to draw itself
out,
permit itself
pendulous loops,

to allow them
meaning,

this meaning,

as it goes
along.

*

Chuck and I are pleased
to have found a spot
where my ashes can be scattered.
It looks like a construction site
now
but it’s adjacent
to a breathtaking, rocky coast.
Chuck sees places
where he might snorkel.
We’re being shown through
by a sort of realtor.
We’re interested but can’t get her
to fix the price.

*

“The future
is all around us.”

It’s a place,

anyplace
where we don’t exist.

[NOTE: in the above poem, lines 3 (the single word "out") and 11 (the single word "along") are to be indented to the drop point of the lines above them. I couldn't get my formatting to make it work for some reason. Apologies. When I get it sorted out I'll come back and fix it. I've gotten it to work in the past.]