As poet Rae Armantrout prepared to read from her new manuscript “Dark Matter,” she fussed with a momentarily malfunctioning podium lamp, trying to illuminate the pages of her black bound notebook.
“If I could only light it,” she sighed.
It was an ironically self-critical statement from Armantrout, who read from her latest book, “Next Life,” and from two unpublished manuscripts, as part of the Distinguished Writers New Voices series at Russell House last Wednesday.
With a collection of her early work forthcoming from Green Integer Books, a poem published in “The New Yorker” in February, and considerable attention from “The New York” Times Sunday Book Review, which included “Next Life” among a list of “100 Notable Books of 2007,” Armantrout is hitting it big — big, that is, for a poet. She has published ten books of poetry, including two finalists for the PEN Center Award in Poetry: the 2004 “Up to Speed,” and the 2001 “Veil: New and Selected Poems,” both published by Wesleyan University Press.
From the poems that Armantrout shared on Wednesday, it became clear that “Next Life” is a meditation on the sense of loss caused by a fragmented consciousness, beset on all sides by media images, or what one poem called “the mass-produced/ glass ball reflections.” In “Subject,” her poetic syntax called attention to the odd juxtapositions of a media-saturated life: “I was just going to click/ on ’Phoebe is changed/ into a mermaid/ tomorrow!’ when suddenly/ it all changed/ into the image of a citizen watch/ If each moment is in love/ with its image/ in the mirror of/ adjacent moments/ (as if matter stuttered)/ then of course, we’re restless!”
Armantrout also found ways to address American immigration politics, the War on Terror and make light of popular culture in a number of humorous references. She consistently showed skepticism in a poem’s ability to “make it new,” as Ezra Pound once mandated of poets: “Make it new.”
“Each poem says,/ “I’m desperate”/ then, Everything/ must go!” one poem declared, in stanzas that “New York Times” reviewer Stephen Burt described as “compact and as densely patterned as silicon chips” in a March 18 review.
Armantrout also read from two new manuscripts: “Versed” and “Dark Matter.” Consistently, her prose was spare and poised, written with a skeptical distance akin to that of Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams, whom Armantrout cites as major influences.
Although Armantrout is often recognized for her associations with Language Poetry, many of her poems, particularly the new ones, could be considered lyrical. Ultimately, as the Russell House reading made clear, Armantrout is an experimentalist who does not fall easily under a single label. Her poems demand that readers pay careful attention to the nature of language itself, an attention that students eagerly displayed last Wednesday.
Leave a Reply