Looking at A Poem from Rae Armantrout's Versed

I tend to read much less poetry these days.

Rae Armantrout's Versed is one of those funny exceptions, a book which repeatedly calls me back, and never fails to tweak the nose of my perhaps snobbish boredom of late.

It reminds me the art is as eternally young as its finest practitioners.

Funny. I often want to accuse poetry of being Tithonus, granted its asked-for "immortality," but allowed to rot there on the shelf. To rot in the culture. Overripe.

My love of Armantrout's poetry is not new. I've been reading and rereading her books for decades. I remember I first encountered her in Precedence, which was one of only a handful of poetry books by contemporaries which I thought to be "as perfect as it gets" in poetry.

And so I knew I wanted to hang around to see where she was going with this new language within the language. And I'm so glad I did.

I never fail to laugh when I remember the one line of her short bio, given in the back of her first book, brought out by The Figures: "I sometimes say I am an unemployed teacher."

The photo of Armantrout which accompanies this tiny biography shows her out in the street, looking almost a hippie.

The strange thing is that even in that genuinely funny little confession, that shared deception, we have the essence of what Armantrout's art is going to be: funny simulacra and shared deception.

In the way that I think of the "Circumference" quote when I think of Emily Dickinson's poetry, I must confess I often think of the schoolteacher line when I think of Armatrout's poetics. Shared deception. Can mean many things. It can be the start of liberation.

I was often flummoxed by the early characterizations of her work: editors talking about how she writes about domesticity. Maybe the person said domesticities. No, I don't think the writer did. At least domesticities would have had a philosophical resonance, a possibility that this was a trope about how the poet attended to the habitation of language.

Later, when I found A Wild Salience, an Armnatrout festschrift filled with perceptive critical essays on her writing, I realized there was no dearth of poets out there who understood Armantrout at a much deeper level. They were scrutinizing her books the way S.E.T.I. radiotelescopes scan the skies.

I really think Armantrout founded her own school of poetry, something I want to call epistemological lyricism. Because while she is rightly conceded to be the most lyrical of the language poets, epistemological concerns fill her books from the first to her most recent, the Pulitzer and National Book Critics Award winning Versed.

Armantrout has cited Williams as a mentor and strong influence, and I can see where that might be. I had at first seen her work as being a sort of synthesis of the poetics of Creeley and Niedecker (but of course with her own wildly divergent themes).

And of course you can find Creeley in Williams. Poems like "The Term" might as well have been written by Robert Creeley. Except he either wasn't born at the time or was a wee child (I'm not sure of the date on that W.C.W. poem).

Lately, I connect Armantrout more with the Stevensian tradition and believe she resembles him more than she does Williams.

Okay, morphologically she resembles Williams more. But philosophically, she's much closer to Stevens. While her poems are skinny and vastly condensed little jewels of Negative Capability like those of Williams in the earlier stage of his career, her gift for reifying philosophical thought so elegantly puts me much more in mind of Stevens. Because that was his schtick. When Stevens wasn't being overly ornate or finical or lyrically persnickety, he was engaging the relativistic turn philosophy had taken, following the new science.

If I had to name the dominant theme in Stevens' oeuvre, it's just that: relativistic thought.

Armantrout has confessed to being an avid follower of contemporary physics, and I find her poetry often reifies the ideas of the quantum (and post-quantum?) universe.

Armantrout's poems often seem to occur (or spontaneously combust?) in that zone where linguistic analysis meets physics.

Oddly enough, physics has somewhat remarried language again, after a rather public and horrid divorce that we were all assured was quite final. I'm thinking of theories of the new physics which almost seem like anachronistic heresies to the formerly "new" physics, theories like the anthropic principle.

I wanted to look at a poem here that was getting at me (in a good way) today.


Wannabe


Impossibly teetering
is one way
to remain.

Half contemptuous, half
ravished

by vampire wannabes
maybe.

     *

A two-lane highway
between ghost-towns -

one of the cliches
you love

the memory, not
of events

but of continuity
itself.

     *

Who are you anyway?


With an Armantrout poem, the delight is often in the doubleness.

This could be read facilely as a poem about its ostensible subject matter, a human wannabe.

What, we might ask, would be the point of taking a cruel jab at such a nobody?

Well, there would hardly be a point then.

But there's the rub.

This poem, like many in Versed, adopts a tone towards language that is martial but also oddly marital. There is a familiarity that has bred contempt here. Because the poem is talking to itself, about itself. With Armantrout, it is often the poem as Twittering Machine. But context often throws a weird pall over the retweets. The poems, with their asterisked segmentations, are often like brains with their corpora callosa severed. You can prevent epileptic seizures by doing that. Because in epilepsy the sides of the brain are talking back and forth too rapidly, crazily cycling. Maybe Armantrout's asterisks are her way of severing the corpus callosum.

The poems suspect reality might be suffering from several forms of lucrative aphasia. And they want to simulate that. Or model it for us. They're aphasic runways. I mean that in the nicest possible way. The models are all very good and very skillful. They have the most amazing walk. They imitate our impoverished philosophy with their babytalk and we have to laugh. Because they're so damn funny. Their italics (italicized or not) are like porn starlets' bullwhips.

Also, I think maybe they want to hold up the Aphasia Savings & Loan building. They are a little bit outlaw.

With this poem, we try to read both narratives at once, and it's difficult and disorienting. It's like dreaming while we're coming awake. It's like trying to do that Inuit throat-singing where you're singing in several different places at once.

The wannabe spends his or her life "impossibly teetering" between being nobody and somebody, but so does language, if we try to go after its monads of sense. Gonads of sense?

A word in Derrida's skein of language has no meaning by itself. It must continue impossibly teetering, reaching out to other points of refererence other than itself, to have any identity at all. A word is, indeed, a wannabe. A word has only contingent existence.

But then aren't neurons the same way?

How funny it is to think of words as "vampire wannabes." How funny and how accurate. The model is language as parasitology. Burroughs (or Laurie Anderson): "Language is a virus from outer space."

"A two lane highway / between ghost towns" is indeed the cliched model of human communication via language.

And one feels the poet has accurately described how reality is processed: we don't really keep the memory "of events" so much as we keep the memory of our "continuity" of experience, our inner monologue of reaction, which is more proprioceptive than perceptive often. And that "continuity" allows for all sorts of sensory and intellectual hyperbole, litotes, you name it. Coloration is reality. Tinge is a truer word than color. Both words imply volition if used as verbs. But tinge is more molluskan, truer to the way consciousness insinuates itself into "objectivity."

This poem is a funny and eerie detournement of a tabloidia-type nasty exchange into a philosophical confrontation between self and its composer, poem and its composer.

The closing line one hears in the appropriately nasty way, at first, but then later one hears the fright that lurks under the aggression ("Could this wannabe be an actual threat?") The alien is too close.

The poem (just as the self) is composed entirely of language and making minatory gestures towards language. Using language. As a defense. Which is an attack.

The doubling going on in this poem is just amazing, totally virtuosic.

This poem is its own doppelganger, one twin accusing the other of not being the real thing.

This is typical of the ingeniousness of poems in Versed, and should give you some idea of how deviously straightforward Armantrout is as a poet.

I'm amused by how the martial tone carries throughout the collection, the sniping like the Red Queen going after the White, when they must both realize they're characters in an imaginary Work.

This adds the vital quality of Fancy (Keats' beloved) to this collection.

There is a charm like that one encounters in Carroll's books. Both authors write books filled with intellectual conundra humorously put.

But this metaphysical combat to which I refer above has a deadly-serious backdrop as well.

The poet successfully waged a war against cancer, that other metastasizing and ubiquitous thing.

It is eerie, impressive and moving to find her creating great poetry out of the anguish of illness, and doing it by studying what is taking place in her body at the cellular level.

She keeps up the objectivity of the scientist even when she knows she is writing through the strong possibility of imminent death (mercifully not the outcome).

But Armantrout is ever a realist; she knows it's always a reprieve, never a total pardon. (Mortality, like snow, is general over Ireland. And everywhere else.)

One poem ends with the lines "an impossible flirtation."

And it's clear that there Armantrout is speaking of life.

A quip like that is typical of the poet's mordant and ever-memorable wit.