The Art of Poetry No. 106
RAE ARMANTROUT
Independent, skeptical, laconic, and always lyrical, Rae Armantrout is a poet of wit and precision. Her poems are typically built of brief sections and short lines in which every word and syllable has been carefully weighed and placed. She also values alacrity and surprise. Arcs of argument can end midflight or spring abruptly in unforeseen directions. The tone shifts, and shifts again. The rewards of her quicksilver verse are many: she helps, as William Blake once put it, to cleanse the doors of perception. You look anew at everyday things and delight in language’s myriad marvels and traps. You also laugh out loud.
Her poems often bring together contraries. She shuttles from topics as ambitious as cosmology and theology to things as ordinary as weeds glimpsed out a window or remarks overheard in a coffeehouse. She has written about intimately personal and private matters, such as motherhood and her treatment for a rare, painful cancer, and she has tackled urgent public matters such as immigration, climate change, and economic inequality.
Armantrout is a West Coaster through and through. She grew up in San Diego during the post–World War II boom years, attended Berkeley at the height of the Vietnam War, and for many years taught creative writing at the University of California, San Diego. She recently moved to Everett, Washington, a town north of Seattle, to be near her son’s family.
Critics often associate Armantrout with the avant-garde Language poetry movement. During the seventies, she helped found its San Francisco branch. Her first books, Extremities (1978) and The Invention of Hunger (1979), like the early works of her colleagues Lyn Hejinian, Bob Perelman, and Ron Silliman, experiment with narrative discontinuity, syntactic disruption, and found text. She has never, though, been content to travel in a pack. From the beginning, her work has been more autobiographical and songlike than that of her Language poetry peers. While she has continued to correspond and collaborate with them, she has pursued her own singular path. She has written more than fifteen books, including Necromance (1991), Veil (2001), and Versed (2009), which won the Pulitzer Prize. Her most recent, Wobble (2018), was a finalist for the National Book Award. A new collection, Conjure, is forthcoming in 2020.
The first time I showed up at her door in sedate suburban Everett, she gave me a tour of the house, then took me into the backyard to show me a geodesic dome that her husband had just built as a greenhouse for growing Venus flytraps. It was a perfect introduction to Armantrout’s world: one thing follows another and suddenly you’re not quite sure where you are, and anything can happen next. As she writes in the poem “If”:
One cultivates
a garden of peculiars
… … … … ….
are you ready
for a new season?
INTERVIEWER
A frequent theme and term in your work has been beauty. Is there something about the question of how aesthetics relates to writing that has particularly drawn you in?
RAE ARMANTROUT
I do think beauty is a puzzle. I assume we’re all attracted to beauty, though we may find beauty in different things. Lately we’ve realized that many of our ideas of beauty are determined by our cultural values, and that we tend to impose these ideas on other cultures. So now we’re afraid to speak the word. But people who aren’t drawn to beauty are rare. I think that what set modern humans apart from Homo erectus and most other hominid species wasn’t so much that they could grind ax heads or spear tips—it was that they ornamented themselves. They made necklaces.
INTERVIEWER
And it’s not just ornamentation, it’s also representation.
ARMANTROUT
I’m not somebody who ornaments herself, by the way. I don’t have jewelry. But my sense is that beauty makes life worth living. For me it’s really the beauty of nature—light and shadow, leaves and trees—that gives joy. And then some poems, some paintings, some music.
INTERVIEWER
In your poetry you’ve been drawn to moments of contemplation of different plants, of grass or leaves. I was wondering, because that clearly has something to do with the beautiful, what about those moments appeals to you?
ARMANTROUT
I see plants as slow-motion spontaneous gestures. They’re working according to a pattern, but they also have some spontaneity in how they grow. People who write about beauty often talk about symmetry being hardwired into our preferences. That’s not wrong, but symmetry by itself gets boring. What’s exciting, what’s pleasurable, is symmetry with deviation. And the fractal development of plants is endlessly attractive to me—the way they repeat themselves on different scales. It’s like music.
I’m particularly drawn to the play of light and shadow, to the way plants and their shadows move. The absence of light is the main reason that the move to the Pacific Northwest has been hard for me. In winter there just aren’t enough shadows and there aren’t enough leaves and there aren’t enough contours in
