Rae Armantrout

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Rae Armantrout
Books of her Poetry (alphabetical). Books of her Prose (alphabetical). Time Line.

Rae Armantrout featured in:

Best American Poetry: 2014 (guest editor Terrance Hayes) with "Control" (in two asterix-separated groups of fragments). She commented:

'Control' began with the experience of learning (or trying to learn) to meditate. The first stanza reproduces the instructor's advice that we should 'set obtrusive thoughts aside.' The third, fifth, and eighth stanzas develop my response to this experience while the second, fourth, sixth, and seventh stanzas present the obtrusive thoughts as fragments of the debris field of American media culture.

Best American Poetry: 2012 (guest editor Mark Doty) with "Accounts" (in three asterix-separated groups of fragments). She commented:

I invited a professor of astrophysics at UC San Diego, Brian Keating, to lunch, hoping he could help me understand the origin of matter in the early universe. The poem is not a transcript of our conversation, but rather an absurdist account of my attempts to visualize what Brian was saying. At times it takes the form of two voices, one correcting the other. Such visualizations and corrections could go on indefinitely.

Best American Poetry: 2011 (guest editor Kevin Young) with "Soft Money". She commented:

The poem spins out of that standard description of an exoticized erotic dancer [in a partly heard Duran Duran song]. It proceeds to run some of the changes on the always complex relationship between sex and power.

Best American Poetry: 2008 (guest editor Charles Wright) with "Framing". She commented:

'Framing' was composed on a beautiful day in an especially wet year in San Diego (2005). The unusually dry hills were 'articulated' by or with flowers, and migrating butterflies swarmed everywhere. I had recently learned of Robert Creeley's death. It seemed like a particularly lousy day on which to be dead.

Best American Poetry: 2007 (guest editor Heather McHugh) with "Scumble", a single small section of questions and fragments. She commented:

Part of the pleasure of poetry has always been the rather strange pleasure of 'calling one thing by another's name.' That's what metaphor does, after all. 'Scumble' asks about the psychology of this phenomenon. What is the kick in substitution? Is it covertly erotic?

Best American Poetry: 2004 (guest editor Lyn Hejinian) with "Almost" (in two numbered groups of fragments). She commented that the poem is:

in two sections, each dealing with the relation of language to the self. Each begins pretty reasonably and becomes less sensible as it proceeds. The last three lines may (or may not) gesture toward 'the lyric.'

Best American Poetry: 2002 (guest editor Robert Creeley) with "Up to Speed" (in five asterix-separated groups of fragments). She commented that the poem:

is about the experience of time — the ways in which we try and fail to grasp it. The Sphinx's question to Oedipus ... is really about the nature of time. His clever answer ('man') leads him, well, you know where.

Best American Poetry: 2001 (guest editor Robert Hass) with "The Plan" (in three asterix-separated groups of fragments). She commented that it:

like many of my poems, is written in three quasi-independent sections [separated by asterisk]. Each ... has a different context, literally refers to a different situation. What interests me is the way that such separate parts can interpenetrate (affect/inflect) on another. The first section is a take on the Garden of Eden story. The second might be located in a hotel where a pair of kinky lovers meet. I'm interested in seeing what sparks fly when such scenarios bump into each other.

Books of Poetry (alphabetical).

Aphoristic Wit (1995). Blog entry.

• 31 poems in 52 pages.
• 4th book poems.
• Clever in a 'trying too hard' way.
• 147 of the poems have asterisk-divided sections.
• 6 of the poems have numbered sections.
• A few with long lines, some prose-poem sections.
• Phrases like 'in the dream' flag that some of the non-sequiturs and surrealism are due to her use of dream material.

Couverture (1991). Selected translations into French.

Extremities (1978).

The Invention of Hunger (1979)

Itself (2015).

21 poems from Itself are included in Partly: new and selected poems, 2001-2015.

Just Saying (2013).

Made To Seem (1995).

Money Shot (2011).

Necromance (1991). Blog entry.

• 29 poems in 42 pages.
• 4th book poems.
• Clever in a 'trying too hard' way.
• 7 of the poems have asterisk-divided sections.
• 2 of the poems have numbered sections.
• Many long lines, some prose-poem sections.

Next Life (2007).

Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2015 (2016).

Includes:

• 32 new poems (22 with one-word titles). Favorites of those are:
  [p. 8] "Canary".
  [p. 9] "Mistakes".
  [p. 12] "Surplus".
  [p. 13] "Assembly".
  [p. 19] "Parallel Worlds Theory".
  [p. 21] "Word Problems".
  [p. 23] "Torn".
  [p. 25] "Divisor".
  [p. 26] "Life's Work".
  [p. 29] "The Ether".
  [p. 43] "Lie".
• 13 from Up to Speed (2004). Favorites of those are:
  [p. 55] "Form".
  [p. 59] "End Times".
• 14 from Next Life (2007). A favorite is:
  [p. 75] "Tease".
• 24 from Versed (2009).
• 19 from Money Shot (2011), in the sequence in the original book except for closing with "Number". Favorites are:
  [p. 143] "Prayers".
  [p. 156] "With".
• 21 from Just saying (2013). Favorites of those are:
  [p. 180] "The Look".
  [p. 181] "My Apocalypse".
• 21 from Itself (2015). Favorites of those are:
  [p. 205] "Chirality" (the word denotes a kind of asymmetry and is used often with molecules to designate that its image is not superposable upon its mirror image).
  [p. 222] "Believing".
  [p. 223] "Head".

The Pretext (2001).

Precedence (1985).

Up to Speed (2004).

Veil: New and Selected Poems (2001).

Versed (2009). Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry National Book Critics Circle Award Winner Blog entry.

Here, as with many of her other poems, it takes effort to untangle the topic unless the poet gives you more of a hint than is in the work. Her comments in Best American Poetry annuals are helpful to nudge open a door on some of her process and intentions.

The inner book cover includes:

Rae Armantrout has always organized her collections of poetry as though they were works in themselves. Versed brings two of these sequences together, offering readers an expanded view of the arc of her writing. The poems in the first section, 'Versed', play with vice and versa, the perversity of human consciousness. They flirt with error and delusion, skating on a thin ice that inevitably cracks: 'Metaphor forms / a crust / beneath which / the crevasse / of each experience.' 'Dark Matter', the second section, alludes to more than the unseen substance thought to make up the majority of the mass in the universe. The invisible and unknowable are confronted directly as Armantrout's experience with cancer marks these poems with a new austerity, shot through with her signature wit and stark unsentimental thinking. Together the poems of Versed part us from our assumptions about reality, revealing the gaps and fissures in our emotional and linguistic constructs, showing us ourselves where we are most exposed.

The lines are usually short (one to five words) and the stanzas also are short (mainly one to three lines). The book is in two halves, its title poem being the second in its half:

	Versed	Dark Matter
Number of poems	43	44
Number of poem pages	62	67
Poems with 1-to-3 lines per stanza	32	34
Poems with 2 numbered sections	8	12
Poems with 3 numbered sections	3	4
Poems with 4 numbered sections	2	1
Poems with 2 asterisk-separated sections	2	7
Poems with 3 asterisk-separated sections	12	8
Poems with 4 asterisk-separated sections	5	1
Poems with 5 asterisk-separated sections	2	1
Poems with 6 asterisk-separated sections	1	0
Poems with 8 asterisk-separated sections	1	0
Poems with extra spaces denoting sections	2	0
Poems with titled sections	0	1
Poems in a single section	5	7
Includes a prose poem	7	4
Part is double-spaced (or a sequence of 1-line stanzas)	4	6
No period at close of poem	27	12
Number of poems	43	44

writing the plot about sets (1998). Chapbook.

Books of Prose (alphabetical)

Collected Prose (2007).

True (1998).

Time Line.

1947.

Born.

1969.

Poetry: Poems.

1978.

Poetry: Extremities.

1979.

Poetry: The Invention of Hunger.

early 1980's.

Poetry: Began teaching writing at UC San Diego.

1985.

Poetry: Precedence.

1991.

Poetry (translated into French): Couverture.

Poetry: Necromance.

1995.

Poetry: Made To Seem. Aphoristic Wit.

1998.

Poetry chapbook: writing the plot about sets.

Prose memoir: True.

2001.

Poetry: Veil: New and Selected Poems.

Poetry: The Pretext.

2004.

Poetry: Up to Speed.

2007.

Poetry: Next Life.

Prose: Collected Prose.

2009.

Poetry: Versed.

2010.

Poetry: Pulitzer Poetry Prize (U.S.A) for Versed.

Poetry: National Book Critics Circle Award (U.S.A).

2011.

Poetry: Money Shot.

2013.

Poetry: Just saying.

2015.

Poetry: Itself.

2016.

Poetry: Partly : new and selected poems, 2001-2015.

Books.

Links and Books.

• Laureate: the Poets Laureate of Britain
• Laureate: the Poets Laureate of the U.S.A.
• Best Poems by the Best Poets - Some Lists of Winners.
• Other Books of Poetry Form.

Books of Poetry Form. Alphabetic list of poetry forms and related topics. Poetry Home.

Copyright © 2006-2016 by J. Zimmerman, except for the quoted prose & poems. All rights reserved.