ARMANTROUT, (Mary) Rae

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Nationality: American. Born: Vallejo, California, 13 April 1947. Education: California State University, San Diego, 1965–68; University of California, Berkeley, 1969–70, B.A. 1970; California State University, San Francisco, 1972–75, M.A. 1975. Family: Married Charles Korkegian in 1971; one son. Career: Teaching assistant, California State University, San Francisco, 1972–73; lecturer, California State University, San Diego, 1979–82. Since 1981 lecturer, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla. Awards: California Arts Council fellowship, 1989; Fund for Poetry award, 1993, 1999. Address: 4774 East Mountain View Drive, San Diego, California 92116, U.S.A.

Publications

Poetry

Extremities. Great Barrington, Massachusetts, The Figures, 1978.

The Invention of Hunger. Berkeley, California, Tuumba, 1979.

Precedence. Providence, Rhode Island, Burning Deck, 1985.

Necromance. Los Angeles, Sun and Moon Press, 1991.

Made to Seem. Los Angeles, Sun and Moon Press, 1995.

Writing the Plots about Sets. Tucson, Arizona, Chax, 1998.

True. Berkeley, California, Atelos, 1998.

The Pretext. Los Angeles, Sun and Moon Press, 1999.

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Critical Studies: "Armantrout: Extremities" by Susan Howe, in The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, edited by Bruce Andrews and Charles Bernstein, Southern Illinois University Press, 1984; "The Siren Song of the Singular" by Jeffrey Peterson, in Sagetrieb (Orono, Maine), 12(3), winter 1993; "See Armantrout for an Alternate View" by Michael Leddy, in Contemporary Literature, 35(4), winter 1994; The Marginalization of Poetry: Language, Writing, and Literary History by Bob Perelman, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1996; "Finding Grace: Modernity and the Ineffable in the Poetry of Rae Armantrout and Fanny Howe" by Ann Vickery, in Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses, 37, 1998; A Wild Salience: The Poetry of Rae Armantrout edited by Tom Beckett and Luigi-Bob Drake, Cleveland, Ohio, Burning Press, 1999.

Rae Armantrout comments:

I began reading poetry seriously in high school. The first poets I responded to were William Carlos Williams and Robinson Jeffers. A little bit later I encountered the work of Robert Creeley, Denise Levertov, and Charles Olson. I studied with Levertov when I was a student at Berkeley. It was there, too, that I met people such as Ron Silliman and Barrett Watten. We formed one nexus of the group later known as language poets.

I am interested in the psychology of perception, especially in the way the mind distinguishes discrete objects. What is a thing? What is a self? I think I deal with this problem mimetically by producing the dubious unity of the poem.

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Throughout her career Rae Armantrout has aligned herself with the movement generally known as language poetry, sometimes called, after the title of an important theoretical journal published by this group of writers, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. In the years around 1970 a group of poets that included Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, and Charles Bernstein sought to move beyond the search for a unique personal voice that had set the tone of the poetry of the 1960s, both the confessional poetry of Lowell, Plath, and Sexton and the projectivism of Olson and his followers. The leaders of this new avant-garde argued instead that poetry should engage in a critical interrogation of language itself as the mechanism that creates the illusion of an "authentic" subjectivity and thereby trammels us in socially constructed ways of perceiving and acting. The language poets found precedents for their own practices in the syntactic dislocations of William Carlos Williams and Louis Zukofsky and in Gertrude Stein's attempts to probe the limits of referentiality in such works as Tender Buttons.

By the mid-1970s language poetry had established itself as a coherent and well-organized movement, with its own journals and publishers, and Armantrout had emerged as a poet within the movement. In the American Tree, the 1986 anthology that first brought language poetry to a larger public, includes a substantial selection of her work, and some of her later books were issued by Sun and Moon, a principal publisher of language poetry. In an essay appended to In The American Tree, moreover, Armantrout explicitly aligns herself with this movement. She praises Susan Howe for "call[ing] our attention to the effect of linguistic structure on belief," and she salutes Carla Harryman for putting "content at odds with syntactical (or sometimes narrative) structures in order to make these structures stand out, enter our consciousness." "The writers I like," Armantrout declares, "bring the underlying structures of language/thought into consciousness. They spurn the facile. Though they generally don't believe in Truth, they are scrupulously honest about the way word relates to word, sentence to sentence."

Armantrout's own poetry seeks and often achieves many of the qualities that she admires in Howe and Harryman. Armantrout writes lean, almost minimalist poems, and she publishes them in equally lean volumes. While other language poets have experimented with extended prose poems (Silliman, Hejinian, Harryman) or with poetic sequences (Bruce Andrews, both Susan and Fanny Howe), Armantrout has remained faithful to the short poem, usually written in a clipped Creeleyesque line, although her books generally also include occasional forays into the prose poem. Her publisher places her within the tradition of Emily Dickinson, and the comparison is apt. Like Dickinson, Armantrout compresses linguistic structures until they implode. Dickinson saw poetry as a "gift of screws" that wring out the "essential oils," and Armantrout agrees. The work of both poets takes fire from the friction of disparate, even clashing words rubbing up against one another. In part the impulse behind these verbal juxtapositions is simply a spirit of play: Armantrout shares Dickinson's sometimes murderous wit. But both poets want to look at—and thus perhaps to see beyond—the linguistic and social structures that hem us in.

As compared even to the most enigmatic of Dickinson's poems, Armantrout's may seem willfully opaque. Yet if we pay careful attention to her words as they have been placed on the page, without demanding an immediately recognizable human feeling, new possibilities of interconnection begin to come together in our minds. Only by looking in some detail at a specific Armantrout poem can we see how this process takes place. "Family Resemblances" is a relatively simple example:

   Old broom,
   is it straw-yellow?
   stitched with parallel
   lightning bolts
   like the skirt of a square-dancer
 
 
    who seems familiar
   though she won't notice you,
   displaying her do-si-dos
   in the flicker
   from Lawrence Welk's studio.

The title locates us in a comfortably domestic sphere, and the first phrase of the poem seems to invite a mild nostalgia. Remember when your mother swept the kitchen with a "real" broom made of straw, not a plastic imitation? But the next line reminds us that we live in a realm of commodities. This broom, however old it might be, is perhaps not made of real straw. Rather it is, or it might be, "strawyellow"—and why, after all, do the manufacturers of plastic brooms almost always make them yellow? The question mark also suggests that we are not sure what color the broom is. We may be seeing not the broom itself but rather a picture of it, perhaps, as the last line of the poem suggests, on a television screen. In any case the fibers of the broom are bound together by two rows of lightning bolt stitches, and the poet notices a similar pattern on the whirling skirt of a square dancer. Hence the title: there is a family resemblance between the broom and the dancer. Both seem familiar. Both speak to our hunger for tradition.

Both broom and dancer, however, are in fact commodities, "ideologically overdetermined" as critical theory might say. The dancer on the screen looks into our eyes and smiles reassuringly but does not really see or know us. The illusion of familiarity, the affirmation of "traditional family values," is a trap. The flicker of the television screen defines our distance from the world of the dancer. As we recognize the dancer as a commodity, her willingness to display her "do-si-dos" for us becomes obscene, a kind of prostitution. The nominalization of the caller's command to the dancers also enacts a process we may observe throughout the poem. Grammatically, the syntax never quite resolves itself into a sentence, although it seems constantly on the verge of doing so. The failure of the nouns to find a main verb shifts the focus back to the nouns: "broom," "bolts," "skirt," "square-dancer," "do-si-dos," "flicker," "studio." "A noun," Armantrout suggests in another poem, "is a kind of scab." "Family Resemblances" wants not to pull away the scab but to remind us that these nouns are scabs and that there are real wounds under them.

—Burton Hatlen