There’s something so American about Rae Armantrout’s poetry. It has the sudden breaks, the start-and-stop of Emily Dickinson; the direct colloquial speaking voice of William Carlos Williams; the abstract playfulness of John Ashbery. Her poems offer a constant sense of reinvention, and an invitation to the reader to make it all up along with the poet that I think of as America’s gift to poetry.
This is a poet who puts her secrets on the page and calls on the reader to figure them out, which, I admit, I sometimes find to be a bit of a challenge. In “Just So,” I’m still wondering how Armantrout does it, how she moves effortlessly from the shadows of birds in a pear tree to a child dyeing a dog green. Maybe this is a poem about how one thing just follows another in some rather arbitrary fashion as we try, not very successfully, to connect the dots:
The effort
to be definite
is cute, I think
the arch in the middle
of her top lip
just so
A poem about flux ends with an arresting image of beauty and precision. That child’s lip could belong to the mysterious smile of an archaic Greek statue.
Humor is a quality that we could use a lot more of in contemporary poetry, so I appreciate Armantrout’s comic sense. “About Time” gives us the whole of history from the perspective of eternity: “‘It all happened so fast,’ / God said.” Well, God would think that, wouldn’t she, as she scrolls through time, her photo album. Our human perspective could not be more different: “‘Shut Up!’ / says the voice inside the clock. / ‘Shut up!’” (“Interior”).
“I try to align / latent spaces,” Armantrout writes in “Since You Asked.” I take the title as a kind of reply to those wanting to know what she tries to do in her poetry. “The question is what / can be ignored.” If you cut out all the irrelevant bits, what’s left? And how do you know what’s irrelevant? Maybe each of us gets to decide for her/him/them self.
Don’t miss Molly Peacock’s spectacular poems on widowhood and Millicent Borges Accardi’s poem about a long-ago abortion.
