Rae Armantrout: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

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The Craft Talk

 

So that the best thing you could do, it seemed, was climb inside the machine that was language

and feel what it wanted or was capable of doing at any point, steering only occasionally.

 

The best thing was to let language speak its piece while standing inside it—not like a knight in

armor exactly, not like a mascot in a chicken suit.

 

The best thing was to create in the reader or listener an uncertainty as to where the voice she

heard was coming from so as to frighten her a little.

 

Why should I want to frighten her?

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Describing the poems in Rae Armantrout’s latest book, Go Figure, Library Journal says, ‘”she has honed enduring art on the ephemera that constitute a consciousness in motion through the present.” Charles Bernstein says, “Her sheer, often hilarious, ingenuity is an aesthetic triumph.” Armantrout’s 2018 book, Wobble, was a finalist for the National Book Award that year. In 2010 Versed won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals including Poetry, Conjunctions, Lana Turner, The Nation, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Harpers, The Paris Review, Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology and several editions of The Best American Poetry.

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                                                                                    Man in chicken suit, 1900                                                 

 

Comments

[Grace Cavalieri]

Rae makes language forever young.

[Sr. Leslie]

That first line blows me away!…What she does with language! And yes, she frightens me…! Great selection Terence, thank you and thank you Rae!

[Beth Joselow]

Ever succinct and apt. Rae does tell it all. Thanks, Rae. Thanks, Terrence.

[Terence Winch]

Beth: thanks for the comment.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Leslie.

[lally]

stunning, in all the best ways, as rae's poems usually are

[Bernard Welt]

As always, it seems like poetry ought to do what Rae Armantrout says it does. She always gets it done. This was a good poem for me to see today.

[Phyllis Rosenzweig]

Yes!

[Don Berger]

Armantrout leaves off with an intriguing question: Is her speaker meaning to frighten us or not? Maybe "a little," maybe not at all--we allow the question to hang there without any need for a fixed conclusion. We don't absolutely have to know the location of the voice. This wonderful craft talk reads like a compressed memoir, the story of the action of writing. The written words moves at will, not always directed, its maker within it. The language isn't limited by simile or metaphor of any kind, or at least the two kinds amusingly offered. And in the end we're blessed with/by uncertainty. Hooray for that! Great pick TW! Rae Armantrout, nice hearing you talk! Long live language!

[Emily Fragos]

Such a free, fresh, and wonderful poem. Thank you, Rae Armantrout.

Thank you, Terence, for this selection and the photo of that poor guy in the chicken suit.

[Terence Winch]

Don: Thanks for that comment.

[Terence Winch]

Thanks, Emily!

[David Beaudouin]

If by “frighten,” Rae means to confront the reader with words expressed in an unfamiliar and even disorienting way, then the answer is, “Because that’s what the most interesting poetry is given to do.” As Kenneth Koch wrote in his poem, “Days and Nights,” “Our idea is to do something with language/ That has never been done before…” There’s no better craft talk than this poem—thanks, Rae and Terence!

[Terence Winch]

David: thanks for the comment.