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Showing posts with label <b>Rae Armantrout</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a>
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<div class='status-msg-hidden'>Showing posts with label <b>Rae Armantrout</b>. <a href="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/">Show all posts</a></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, April 12, 2010</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/armantrout/"><span style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;color:windowtext;text-decoration:none; text-underline:none'><img border="0" height="326" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh4.googleusercontent.com/proxy/cE49O5tLCRepNWIi7CNCK5jZrctVIEkkdjAcQXIpZX8spzugwgrztZUc7cNRIlPixJ98HUXHgCNF-V8Wss6WHN3jxUtsySsAdLBfYI5O_RAB%3Ds0-d" width="456"></span></a><span style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1; mso-themetint:242'><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><span style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1; mso-themetint:242'><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/index.php?entries=10"><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>Rae Armantrout</span></a> <br> has won the <a href="http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2010-Poetry"><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>Pulitzer Prize</span></a><br> for <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://stevenfama.blogspot.com/2010/04/holy-versed.html"><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>Versed</span></a><o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><span style='font-size:12.0pt;line-height:115%;color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1; mso-themetint:242'><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rae_Armantrout"><span style='color:#0D0D0D;mso-themecolor:text1;mso-themetint:242'>Happy Birthday</span></a>, Rae!<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Saturday, February 28, 2009</span></h2>

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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, February 09, 2009</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>There is a tonal shift in &#8220;Dark Matter,&#8221; the sequence that composes the second half of Rae Armantrout&#8217;s <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.upne.com/0-8195-6879-1.html"><span style='color:black'>Versed</span></a>, </i>quite unlike anything elsewhere in her writing. I want very much to remove that qualifier, &#8220;her,&#8221; but I&#8217;d have to read more than I have. Let me say it this way: there is a tonal shift here quite unlike anything I have ever seen in writing. Armantrout has envisioned death in a new way. It&#8217;s not a subject I&#8217;d thought was available for this. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Consider the poem &#8220;Anchor&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>&#8220;Widely expected<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
if you will,<br>
cataclysm.&#8221;<br>
<br>
Things I&#8217;d say<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>am </i>saying,<br>
<br>
to persons no longer<br>
present.<br>
<br>
Yards away trim junipers<br>
make their customary<br>
bows.<br>
<br>
&#8221;Oh, no thank you&#8221;<br>
to any of it.<br>
<br>
If you watch me<br>
from increasing distance<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
<br>
I am writing this<br>
always<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>By the end of this short poem, the speaker, old friend &#8220;I,&#8221; exists solely as absence. Each one of us will, in time, reach that curious half-life (that is not one at all) in which others might talk to us the way I talk now to my dead grandparents who raised me or to Robert Duncan or to a dear friend who died far too soon. <span class=GramE>A one-way conversation.</span> And one in which the other is frozen in time: <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I am writing this / always. </i>What is real here is not the physical world at all, but the presence of time, time itself as presence. That&#8217;s exactly why the junipers appear, trans-temporal the way the natural world always appears. So the title of the poem refers not just to a television anchor who might have spoken the overheard words of the first stanza, but to what anchors nouns &amp; to the way they in turn anchor speech.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>The title of the poem on the facing page, &#8220;The Hole,&#8221; is even more concretely focused on absence:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>A string of notes <span style='color:black'>&#8211;</span><br>
<br>
a string of words<br>
could be a worm<br>
or a needle<br>
<br>
passing<br>
in and out<br>
through some hole <span style='color:black'>&#8211;</span><br>
<br>
stitching what to what?<br>
<br>
I imagine myself<br>
passing<br>
among your thoughts<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
<br>
a sleepwalker,<br>
<br>
saying and doing things<br>
I am ignorant of<br>
as they occur.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>These are poems, literally, from beyond the grave. Not at all in the sense of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Topper </i>or </span><st1:City><st1:place><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Casper</span></i></st1:place></st1:City><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>or <span class=SpellE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Ghosthunters</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>but<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>recognizing that one will persist &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>a string of notes / a string of words </i>&#8211; no longer anchored to the physical world. I understand now why a few poems that refer more narratively to Armantrout&#8217;s confrontation with cancer as such were moved out of chronological sequence back into the book&#8217;s first section, which carries the title of the collection, &#8220;Versed.&#8221; They&#8217;re the poems that conceive of illness &amp; death in far more conventional terms &#8211;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Woman in a room near mine moans, &#8220;I&#8217;m dying. I want<br>
to be fine. It&#8217;s my body!<br>
Don&#8217;t let me! Don&#8217;t touch me!&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&nbsp; </span>*<br>
By definition<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
I&#8217;m the blip<br>
floating across my own<br>
&#8220;field of vision . . &#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>When this same narrative is actually named in the book&#8217;s second half, it&#8217;s presented in a frame that goes far past surrealism:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The woman on the mantel,<br>
who doesn&#8217;t much resemble me,<br>
is holding a chainsaw<br>
away from her body,<br>
with a shocked smile,<br>
while an undiscovered tumor<br>
squats on her kidney.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>What keeps this from being black humor in the traditional sense of that phrase is not simply that to exist &#8220;on the mantel&#8221; (with its feminist echo of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>pedestal</i>) one must be reduced to ash, which thereby renders the grotesquery of the image that follows &#8211; quite the figure for surgery &#8211; a scrambling of time (there are at least three present in this sentence). Rather, facing death unblinkingly, the fact that Armantrout was raised in a conservative protestant tradition &#8211; she&#8217;s referred to her mother as a &#8220;holy roller&#8221; &#8211; gives her access to a very different sense of the spiritual as pervasive presence. Indeed <span style='color:black'>&#8211;</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>The present<br>
is a sentimental favorite<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
with its heady mix<br>
of grandiosity<br>
and abjection,<br>
truncated,<br>
framed.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>These themes reach an apotheosis in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Hoop, </i>possibly the finest poem Armantrout has ever written:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>God twirled<br>
across the face of<br>
what cannot be named<br>
since it was not moving.<br>
<br>
God was momentum then<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
that impatience<br>
with interruption,<br>
<br>
stamping time&#8217;s blanks<br>
with its own image<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>I&#8217;m not going to quote the poem&#8217;s longer second half, since it (and the book) ends with a twist. Somewhere in his prose, Olson says that if there is eternity, this is it, which is certainly the case. Here Armantrout literally offers us the face of God &#8211; not your stereotypical language poetry resistance to theme. It was Olson, ironically perhaps, who would be &#8211; in his own chess shorthand &#8211; &#8220;<span class=SpellE>kinged</span> by the kidney,&#8221; dying of cancer at roughly the age Armantrout is now. Her own, I believe, squatted if you will on her pancreas, the same type that took Jerry <span class=SpellE>Estrin</span> &amp; which every story about the actor Patrick <span class=SpellE>Swayze</span> reminds us carries a minuscule survival rate. Thus far, Armantrout is doing amazingly well.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>It will come as no surprise to readers of this blog to learn that Armantrout has been my best friend in poetry now for nearly 40 years. If I never did anything else in poetry other than offer feedback to her incessant drafts &#8211; five versions in a day is not rare &#8211; as part of the little focus group she&#8217;s been using for decades (myself, Fanny Howe, Bob Perelman, Lydia Davis, a few others), I would have had a substantial literary career. Indeed, I used to describe Armantrout as the sister I never had until the ghost in my own life, my long dead father, up &amp; surprised me, giving me a &#8220;real&#8221; sister when I was 50. Life is funny like that. So I don&#8217;t read a book like <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Versed </i>with any sense that I&#8217;m reviewing whether it&#8217;s &#8220;good&#8221; or not &#8211; I take it as a foundational principle of life that any serious person will want to read every word Armantrout&#8217;s ever written. But, within that framework, I have no doubt that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Versed </i>is her greatest book yet. Like John Ashbery, as Armantrout has aged, she&#8217;s been writing more &amp; more. And also better &amp; better. It&#8217;s an unparalleled gift to us all. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, January 27, 2009</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><img height="362" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh5.googleusercontent.com/proxy/Jg3cr1iP8f6iGWg0cVQUp-6zDX6xPrYiHSZs1PndrKGPWo9Miv8q8BbpUJBXQXAj2KuzxQQuiKUHfTKxc7ngYRoEnzYi3ucRGuUvMcXlEuuHLvw%3Ds0-d" width="545"></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Trying to read a book by Rae Armantrout in a single sitting is like trying to drink a bowl of diamonds. What&#8217;s inside is all so shiny &amp; clear &amp; even tiny that it appears perfectly do-able. But the stones are so hard &amp; their edges so chiseled that the instant you begin they&#8217;ll start to rip your insides apart.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>In this regard, Armantrout&#8217;s books are not at all like a book of comparable length by, say, Larry Eigner or Robert Creeley &amp; much closer in fact to the thoroughly composed volumes of Jack Spicer. Like Spicer, Armantrout is someone who benefits enormously if you contain your reading to no more than two or three pieces at a time. For one thing, you will want to read each over &amp; over, savoring the unexpected, &amp; the elegant constructions that sometimes just take your breath away, as in the second &amp; final section of &#8220;Left Behind,&#8221; which is all one sentence:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Dreams <span class=SpellE>unspool</span><br>
contexts<br>
<br>
with an ersatz<br>
tongue-in-cheek<br>
<br>
familiarity, conspicuously<br>
flimsy<span class=GramE>:</span><br>
<br>
a singer intoning &#8220;</span><st1:Street><st1:address><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Venice Boulevard</span></st1:address></st1:Street><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'><br>
on a store sound system<br>
late last night,<br>
<br>
a crooner placing us<br>
perhaps among flight students <span style='color:black'>&#8211;</span><br>
reminiscing,<br>
<br>
&#8221;when you&#8217;re land-<span class=SpellE>ing</span><br>
<span style='color:black'>on Highway <span class=SpellE>Fi-ive</span>&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>An ersatz / tongue-in-cheek / familiarity </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>captures exactly what is at once surreal &amp; horrific about life in Southern California, a terrain that has never been handled with more clinical disdain, not even by <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adorno"><span class=SpellE><span style='color:black'>Theodor</span></span><span style='color:black'> Adorno&#8217;s</span></a> <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Minima <span class=SpellE>Moralia</span> </i>or the neo-gothic sociology of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_Quartz"><span style='color:black'>Mike Davis</span></a>. Like the hard-edged metallic versions that Jeff <span class=SpellE>Koons</span> gives to what at first appear to be balloon puppies, the world depicted in Armantrout&#8217;s poetry is instantly something we recognize &#8211; intimately &#8211; and in the same instant monstrous. Of all of the language poets, even including Barrett Watten &amp; Hannah Weiner (who are closest to her in this regard), Armantrout has the most distinct &amp; identifiable vision.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In a blog review of Armantrout&#8217;s work in this same book, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><a href="http://www.upne.com/0-8195-6879-1.html"><span style='color:black'>Versed</span></a>, </i>just out from Wesleyan, Tom Beckett &#8211; a poet I think of as having used Armantrout&#8217;s influence wisely in his own writing &#8211; characterizes the logic of her poetry as <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:.5in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>entirely</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;
color:black'> phrasal. Every line break is precise as a unit of thought and speech.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>That is, I think, not completely accurate. Often there is some dissonance between the cognitive &amp; the aural and Armantrout almost always sides with the cognitive. She does this to great effect, as in the poem &#8220;Guess,&#8221; where the first line, all 13 syllables of it, is nearly double the length of any other line in the poem. The next two longest, at eight syllables each, complete the first and last couplets of the poem&#8217;s second half. That can&#8217;t be an accident. In each case, Armantrout is setting up what happens in the poem tonally more than aurally. Think, as you read the text, just how fully the second stanza comes together, as tho a lens suddenly snapped into focus revealing the speaker. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'><span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&nbsp;&#160; </span>1<br>
<br>
The jacaranda, for instance, is beautiful<br>
but not serious.<br>
<br>
That much<br>
I can guess.<br>
<br>
And that the view<br>
is <span class=GramE>softened</span> by curtains.<br>
<br>
That the present moment<br>
is an exception<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
<br>
is the queen bee<br>
a hive serves,<br>
<br>
or else an orphan.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&nbsp;&#160; </span>2<br>
<br>
So the jacaranda<br>
is foreign and extravagant.<br>
<br>
It gestures in the distance.<br>
<br>
Between there and here<br>
you ask<br>
<br>
what game<br>
we should play next week.<br>
<br>
So we&#8217;ll be alive<br>
next week<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
<br>
continuing<br>
what you may or may not<br>
<br>
mean to be<br>
an impossible flirtation<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The first line has more syllables than the next three combined. Yet if you broke it out into a couplet, recombining the lines that follow so that the poem&#8217;s first half is composed of exactly six couplets, the utter devastation of the word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>orphan </i>would be lost, as well as the elegant closures to every stanza leading up to that last line. The length of the first line sets up not just the first section, but the entire poem. It is in fact garish in much the same way as the purple flowering tree is that so visually dominates neighborhood after neighborhood in Armantrout&#8217;s native </span><st1:City><st1:place><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>San Diego</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>In each half of the poem, the word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>jacaranda </i>occurs just once, in the first line. Every other word is, in the most literal sense, entirely ordinary. And the line breaks themselves tend to be relatively flat &#8211; if one were a hardcore <span class=SpellE>Projectivist</span>, divining one&#8217;s geographic heritage &amp; accent by such breaks, one might find the roots of this flatness in Armantrout&#8217;s ancestors in Missouri &amp;, I believe, Oklahoma, where a lot of San Diegans first came from &#8211; they leave individual lines as simple &amp; unadorned as <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>next week </i>or <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>continuing</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Armantrout composes her books as thoroughly as Spicer ever did his. The poems are arranged thematically more than, say, chronologically. Thus the last section of &#8220;Name Calling&#8221; &#8211;<o:p></o:p></span></p> 

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>Bud-nipped.</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;
color:black'><br>
<br>
What the pudendum<br>
attempts<br>
to pinch off<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
<br>
tries repeatedly.<br>
<br>
What comes to<br>
be called <span class=GramE>pleasure</span><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span class=GramE><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>&#8211; leads directly to a poem that is entitled &#8220;Pleasure.&#8221;</span></span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'> That can &#8220;ring true&#8221; or &#8220;seem false,&#8221; I think, depending on the reader&#8217;s predisposition to seeing larger patterns in Armantrout&#8217;s work. Still, these aren&#8217;t the closed circuits of a book-as-single-suite the way we might get with Donna Stonecipher or Cole Swensen. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Versed </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>gives us an opportunity to test these larger arcs in Armantrout&#8217;s writing, really for the first time, as it is composed in two sequences &#8211; essentially two complete books. The first of these, from which all of my comments here are taken, is likewise entitled &#8220;Verse,&#8221; the second (with a nod I suppose to Charles Alexander) &#8220;Dark Matter.&#8221; The latter section, the jacket informs us, was written largely after Armantrout was diagnosed with a virulent form of cancer, which she has written about also in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Grand Piano </i>(and which she seems miraculously to be surviving). It&#8217;s true that a poem like &#8220;Guess,&#8221; with that little twist in the second half, was written later than most of the poems in &#8220;Versed,&#8221; but one can go back to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Necromance </i>(1991), if not all the way to Armantrout&#8217;s first book, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Extremities </i>(1978), and find analogous instances of dry fatalism. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>What&#8217;s going on here is illuminated perhaps by &#8220;A Resemblance,&#8221; one of the <span class=GramE>quietest</span>, but sharpest poems in this book:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>As a word is<br>
mostly connotation<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
<br>
matter is mostly<br>
aura?<br>
<br>
<span class=GramE>Halo?</span><br>
<br>
(The same loneliness<br>
that separates me<br>
<br>
from what I call<br>
&#8221;the world.&#8221;)<br>
<br>
<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&nbsp;&#160; </span>*<br>
<br>
Quiet, ragged<br>
skirt of dust<br>
<br>
encircling a ceramic<br>
gourd.<br>
<br>
<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&nbsp;&#160; </span>*<br>
<br>
Look-alikes.<br>
<br>
&#8221;Are you happy now?&#8221;<br>
<br>
<span style='mso-spacerun:yes'>&#160;&nbsp;&#160; </span>*<br>
<br>
Would I like<br>
a vicarious happiness?<br>
<br>
Yes!<br>
<br>
Though I suspect<br>
yours of being defective<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
<br>
forced<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Of the poem's four sections, only the second is truly depictive, in fact one of the most beautiful / terrible moments of description in any recent poetry. It is hardly an accident that the noun here is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>dust. </i>One might characterize the loneliness mentioned in the first section as existential, yet the longing that is articulated later is  uncharacteristic of that aesthetic. This entire poem is about loneliness &#8211; we know the answer to the question in the third section, and it&#8217;s precisely the gap between that and the one figured (absently) in the fourth that rips at a reader&#8217;s emotion. Is that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Quiet, ragged / skirt of dust </i>an objective correlative, straight  out of Eliot? Even if we recall that dust is principally made up of dead skin, the answer is no &#8211; the poem ranges too far abroad for that, not unlike the gap between the spiritualism of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>aura </i>and the Christianity of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>halo. </i>Every word, every line break articulates these distances. And words are &#8211; right? &#8211; <span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>mostly</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> connotation.</i><o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>I&#8217;ll try to get to &#8220;Dark Matter&#8221; sometime later this week, or possibly next. I&#8217;m not going to read (reread) these poems too quickly. Light as these poems seem at first, <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Versed</i> is one of the densest books around. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Tuesday, March 04, 2008</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Early this evening, I will wend my way over to The University of Pennsylvania to help record the eighth <a href="http://poemtalkatkwh.blogspot.com/"><span style='color:black'>PoemTalk,</span></a> a series of podcasts jointly sponsored by the <a href="http://www.poetryfoundation.org/"><span style='color:black'>Poetry Foundation</span></a>, <a href="http://www.writing.upenn.edu/wh"><span style='color:black'>Kelly Writers House</span></a> &amp; <a href="http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound"><span  style='color:black'>PennSound</span></a>. The show&#8217;s host is Al Filreis and I know that Rachel Blau DuPlessis &amp; Charles Bernstein will be other discussants. I&#8217;m not sure exactly who else will be there or just how long we can go on. One of the advantages of the web as format is that it need not be always quite as rigid as broadcast radio in its time constraints, tho otherwise a lot of the same dynamics apply. The programs I&#8217;ve heard thus far easily would fit into a half-hour radio spot. And Al functions as a very active moderator, probing with question after question after question. <span class=GramE>It&#8217;s</span> remarkable how much can be said in the time given once any dead air is edited away. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The premise of the show is simple. A group of readers, predominantly poets, close read a text. To date, there have been shows on poems by William Carlos Williams, Adrienne Rich &amp; George Oppen. Allen Ginsberg singing William Blake went up on the PoemTalk site just yesterday. Others are &#8220;in the can,&#8221; I guess, and working their way to audiocast: Ted Berrigan, a <span class=SpellE>Jaap</span> <span class=SpellE>Blonk</span> sound poem &amp; something by Jerry Rothenberg. An Ashbery text is also on the horizon, but has not yet been brought into the studio. An interesting <span class=GramE>mix</span> albeit still completely white &amp; very male. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Each poem is read by the poet in question as part of PennSound&#8217;s voluminous arch</span><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>ives of modern and contemporary poets. Indeed, if you listen to the Oppen show, you will hear Oppen reading lines over &amp; over as the poets hone in on the meaning of this word, that nuance. In another show, the respondents go so far as to criticize Williams&#8217; own &#8220;easy&#8221; style of reading &#8211; they use two separate recordings of the same poem &#8211; which tended to remove moments of multiple meaning. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Our text for this evening &#8211; it&#8217;s no secret &#8211; is Rae Armantrout&#8217;s &#8220;The Way,&#8221; from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Veil:<o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial'>Card in pew pocket<br>
announces<br>
&#8221;I am here.&#8221;<br>
<br>
I made only one statement<br>
because of a bad winter.<br>
<br>
Grease is the <span class=GramE>word,</span> grease<br>
is the way<br>
<br>
I am feeling.<br>
<span class=GramE>Real life emergencies or<br>
<br>
flubbing behind the scenes.</span><br>
<br>
As a child<span class=GramE>,</span><br>
I was abandoned<br>
<br>
in a story<br>
made of trees.<br>
<br>
Here&#8217;s a small<br>
gasp<br>
<br>
of this clearing<br>
come &#8220;upon&#8221; &#8220;again&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>You can hear Rae read the poem <a href="http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Armantrout/WPS1/Armantrout-Rae_06_Way_WPS1_NY_5-10-06.mp3"><span style='color:black'>here</span></a>, and discuss it <a href="http://media.sas.upenn.edu/Pennsound/authors/Armantrout/WPS1/Armantrout-Rae_discusses-The-Way_2006.mp3"><span style='color:black'>here</span></a>. You should really hear Rae&#8217;s own take, which is both straightforward &amp; remarkable for all that it doesn&#8217;t say. The text, as she describes it, proceeds by gathering together four seemingly arbitrary elements, which are then followed by two comments of her own.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>But I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s how <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>we </i>read it all. Armantrout is that most curious of language writers &#8211; the post-avant whose work has been accepted in such pre- or even anti-avant venues as <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The New Yorker </i>without sacrificing its fundamentally radical nature.&#185; This poem is a good example of how she manages this, and of how the parsimony principle functions in contemporary poetics in general. That principle, a term borrowed from cognitive linguistics, argues that readers will invariably seek out an interpretation that connects the dots, so to speak, in the simplest conceivable manner. I demonstrate how the effect works in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The New Sentence, </i>using as it happens a passage from an earlier poem by Armantrout, &#8220;Grace&#8221;:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-top:0in;margin-right:0in;margin-bottom:12.0pt;margin-left:1.0in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;mso-bidi-font-family:Arial;color:black'>a spring there<br>
where his entry must be made<br>
<br>
signals him on<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The first section of a short, three-part poem, it&#8217;s always instructive to go about a class, asking people &#8220;what this means.&#8221; Almost always, readers respond with some narrative configuration that &#8220;explains&#8221; each of the parts. The most common, I&#8217;ve found, seem to entail theater and diving. In the former, the reader envisions an actor about to go onstage, taking a step <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>into character</i>. In the latter, the spring is literally that of a diving board. Neither construction is wrong (tho neither is the author&#8217;s own, either), but how one reads what then follows must flow from this first interpretation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Armantrout wrote &#8220;Grace&#8221; over three decades ago. &#8220;The Way,&#8221; which was written around 2000, shows how she has grown more comfortable over time with indeterminacy &amp; disjunction. In some ways, this new poem functions not unlike a <a href="http://www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/artists/david_salle.htm"><span style='color:black'>David Salle</span></a> painting with five or six major images set beside one another that may not seem &#8220;apparent&#8221; in their junctures. A lot of this, I think, will have to do with how the reader takes that most crucial of shifters, the word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I. </i>It occurs four times in the text, only once according to the author in anything akin to her own voice. Yet I think it is impossible not to hear it pulling the text&#8217;s elements together, even as we know &#8211; it is &#8220;obvious&#8221; &#8211; that in the first instance <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I </i>literally <span class=GramE>figures</span> the Lord, albeit one reduced to a pew card tag line. Armantrout goes so far as to revise her appropriation of <a href="http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/grease/grease.htm"><span style='color:black'>Frankie <span class=SpellE>Valli&#8217;s</span> lyrics</span></a> from the title song for <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Grease </i>to bring in the first person singular. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>To see how <span class=GramE>the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>in the poem (pun intended) functions, it&#8217;s useful to look at the two places where it does not appear. The first two sentences are coterminous with their stanzas, setting up a stanza = sentence expectation that is then broken with the way Armantrout then continues onward with couplets &#8211; with one notable exception &#8211; so that the third sentence continues on past &#8220;its&#8221; stanza, a third line setting up what I think of as the poem&#8217;s &#8220;hinge.&#8221; In both of the first two stanzas, the word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I </i><span class=GramE>appears</span> at formally critical moments &#8211; first word of the last line, first word of the first line. But it doesn&#8217;t appear at all in the third stanza <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>tho it does in third sentence. </i>Thus the third <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I </i>simultaneously functions as the first word of the sentence&#8217;s last line &amp; the first word of the new stanza&#8217;s first line. <span class=GramE>Double whammy.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Then, in the fourth sentence &#8211;  again bridging stanzas &#8211; the word suddenly is entirely absent as is any main verb. What we get are two parallel noun phrases &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Real life emergencies, flubbing behind the scenes. </i>The two items are hardly equivalent. The first sounds urgent, even threatening, the latter comic &#8211; I don&#8217;t see how it can&#8217;t possibly call up <span class=GramE>the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'> </i>of the first sentence &amp; equate it with the character of the wizard from Oz, but that&#8217;s my own interpretive supplement here, how I personally hear it. But without an <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I </i>&amp; lacking a main verb, this sentence, which begins in the middle of a couplet &amp; ends with its last line dangling on its own, feels profoundly static. That stasis is at least partly due to the absence of a primary verb, but I think we are set up by Armantrout to hear it principally as the absence of <span class=GramE>the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>. <o:p></o:p></i></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>And that solo line, all by its lonesome? It functions, I think, as a clearing &#8211; the only moment in the poem in which any phrase is given its own stanza. Thus it foretells what happens narratively two sentences later. One might make the argument that the key word in this text is not <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I </i>but <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>flubbing. </i><span class=GramE>A very Armantrout term.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></p> 
<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The second half of the poem proceeds very differently. Each sentence is two couplets long, each feels personal, <span class=GramE>each</span> narratively feels <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>as tho it follows</i>. The flow is completely different. The connections between sentences, which seemed angular or disjunct before, feel much smoother. In the first sentence, the <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I </i><span class=GramE>occurs</span> as the first word of the last line of the first stanza. The second stanza is again devoid of <span class=GramE>an <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>, </i>but it doesn&#8217;t feel like an absence. It is, in fact, only the second couplet in which this happens in the text. The first time reading this poem, we might not even be aware yet that we have already passed the first person singular for the last time here. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>The last sentence is thus the second one without <span class=GramE>an <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I</i></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>. </i>It is also the most depictive sentence in the text, carrying forward the image of trees from the prior couplet (where it is clear that the trees are figurative rather than figured). The key term here, tho, is the least literal &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>gasp </i>&#8211; a unit of breath &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>gasp / of this clearing. </i>No matter how many times I read this stanza, this sentence, this poem, that word always feels to me like a version of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I, </i>tho in reality what is being described would seem to be the clearing itself. This equation of subvocalic breath with <span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>I</i></span></span><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'> </span></i><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>is, to my ear, the ultimate &#8220;move&#8221; being made here. It returns us to the god in the pamphlet of the first stanza, but this time inside out. I also think that the subvocalic is what is being signaled by those very Alice Notley-<span class=SpellE>esque</span> quotation marks in the final line, a double consciousness inhabiting each word precisely because it is double. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>There is a lot more to be said about this poem, some of which I may or may not get to say &#8220;on air&#8221; later today. One of the poem&#8217;s mysteries for me is the word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>trees. </i>It signals not only fairy tales &#8211; Rae Armantrout as Gretel or some such &#8211; but the idea of wood pulp &amp; books. To my ear, it also invokes the word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>threes. </i>I don&#8217;t see any good &#8220;justification&#8221; for this, but I&#8217;ve never been able to shake that reading, perhaps because it points back to my sense of the poem&#8217;s first half as fitting together more in the manner of a collage (tho in actuality it is four elements, albeit with three of the first person singular). That slippage, from <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>trees </i>to <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>threes </i>is, again to my own ear, yet another dimension of the word <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>gasps </i>in the next stanza.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Yet another aspect to this poem as pure craft is how long &#275; sounds &#8211; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Gr<u>ea</u>se, f<u>ee</u>l<u>i</u>ng, emergenc<u>ies</u>, sc<u>e</u>nes, tr<u>ee</u>s </i>&#8211; all bind the middle of this text. The sound is not present at all in the first two stanzas, <span class=GramE>nor</span> the last two, but clearly dominates those three interior sentences. It&#8217;s a small detail, but one of those elements that shows the degree to which Armantrout controls what on other levels could look (or sound) to be a very disjunct text. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>Having said all this, what I don&#8217;t know &#8211; have no clue about &#8211; is what I&#8217;ll say tonight. It will be fun to find out. To hear what others have to say. <span class=GramE>And to see if I still think &amp; feel this same way about this poem tomorrow.</span> <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'><o:p>&nbsp;</o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-bottom:12.0pt'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Arial'>&#185; </span><span style='font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Arial;color:black'>Thus see Stephen Burt&#8217;s <a href="http://www.bostonreview.net/BR27.2/burt.html"><span style='color:black'>discussion of Armantrout</span></a> in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Boston Review </i>about which he notes, of &#8220;The Way,&#8221; that &#8220;Armantrout can sound less like other &#8216;Language writers&#8217; than like an improbably terse stand-up comic.&#8221;<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='margin-bottom:12.0pt;text-align:center'><a href="http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/armant.html"><span style='color:windowtext;text-decoration:none;text-underline:none'><img border="0" height="507" id="_x0000_i1025" src="https://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/images/lh3.googleusercontent.com/proxy/9P7ODcObUEPSl-L1Wugw9Nj943YZ6dm0tT-oNw2jr6fuyBD1PKMfhDJQYb_MslOvSM4P0ahoi2nSmOaLxo8BzZJd7_vMLzhp_M1hHUdqfcYKjxwg73Y%3Ds0-d" width="450"></span></a></p>

<p class=MsoNormal align=center style='text-align:center'><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:26.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:red'><a href="http://www.writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Armantrout.html"><span style='color:red'>Happy</span></a></span></b><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:26.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:blue'> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rae_Armantrout"><span style='color:#3366FF'>Birthday</a></span></b><span class=GramE><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:26.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:fuchsia'>,</span></b></span><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:26.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:blue'><br>
</span></b><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:26.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:purple'><a href="http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/armantrout/"><span style='color:purple'>Rae</span></a></span></b><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:26.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:blue'> </span></b><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:26.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:#FF6600'><a href="http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/1134"><span style='color:#FF6600'>Armantrout</span></a></span></b><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:26.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:teal'>!</span></b><b style='mso-bidi-font-weight:normal'><span style='font-size:26.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:blue'><o:p></o:p></span></b></p>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Monday, February 24, 2003</span></h2>

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<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>Rob
Stanton in the </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style='font-family:
  Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>U.K.</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span
style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'> asks an
interesting question:<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'>Reading back through your blog's archive I notice that
you've referred to Rae Armantrout a couple of times as a poet you feel has a
very different writing process to your own (involving meticulous revisions,
etc.). You actually give an example of this in your intro to <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Veil</i>, comparing
&quot;Manufacturing&quot; with an earlier version, &quot;Veer.&quot; At the </span><a
href="http://www.factoryschool.org/content/sounds/poetry/frontenac.html"><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana;color:black'>Factory School</span></a><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'> site I came across the recording
of you and Armantrout reading </span><a
href="http://www.factoryschool.org/content/sounds/poetry/silliman/silliman_btp598_SD-2.ram"><i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:
Verdana;color:black'>Engines</span></i></a><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>, </span></i><span
style='font-size:10.0pt;font-family:Verdana'>your collaboration. . . . I am
intrigued that the two of you should have worked together in this way, given
the differences you pinpoint between your respective writing 'styles'
(producing a poem Rae obviously likes enough/thinks is an important enough
example of her work to include it in her <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Selected</i>).
I had not actually <span class=SpellE>realised</span> either, until hearing the
recording, that <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Engines</i> represents
part of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Alphabet</i> . . . . I was
wondering if you'd mind telling me something about the thinking behind <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Engines</i>, how it came to be written, and
what the writing process involved. You seem happy enough discussing your work
habits in your blog, so I hope you don't find this question too cheeky. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal style='margin-left:.5in'><span style='font-size:10.0pt;
font-family:Verdana'>&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>I'm
writing this initially from a hotel room at a business conference without
access to any of my books or manuscripts, so am forced to wing it, although I'm
listening to the recording as I work. Armantrout might remember every single
detail here differently. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span class=GramE><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span
style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>Engines</span></i><span
style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'> was</span></span><span
style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'> written in
the very early 1980s, at a time when the poets I knew didn't have access to
computers &amp; had never heard of email. The poem was published in </span><a
href="http://www.conjunctions.com/"><i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'><span
style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman";color:black'>Conjunctions</span></i></a><span
style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'> 4 in 1983.
Armantrout was living in San Diego &amp; I in </span><st1:City><st1:place><span
  style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>San
  Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:City><span style='font-family:Arial;
mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>. We had known one another already for
over a decade &amp;, although I would agree that our actual writing processes
are radically different, I already knew that I felt closer to her poetry than
to that of any other writer I had known. Nearly twenty years later, I still
feel the same way. Possibly, it's because she's able to concentrate so many
different kinds of intelligence into the smallest literary spaces, far more
than I've ever been able to, but does so in ways that I find completely
accessible &amp; available to me. I always learn from reading her work.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>I
have never felt that there was one right way to compose a poem, and certainly
never felt that if such a thing might exist that my own quirky ways came
anywhere close to them. I already knew &#8211; I remember telling this to the
graduate writing seminar I led at SF State in 1981 &#8211; that there were some
things about poetry that could not be taught &amp; that the metabolism of one's
own process was one of these. I do, however, think that one can learn about
one's own processes by exploring differences &amp; variations. One part of the process
of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Alphabet</i> has been just such an
exploration. Every section of the project is an attempt to push my work in a
different direction. Even at the outset, I knew that one section of <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Alphabet</i> would have to be <span
class=GramE>a collaboration</span>. I don&#8217;t know that ever I thought for a
second about anyone other than Rae with this in mind.<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>So
we knew at the outset, particularly once we'd settled on the title, that this
piece would be <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>that, </i>that it would
become a part of my project, and that it would also have a completely separate
&amp; different existence within the framework of Rae's own writing. I actually
think that this double life was one of the things that excited us &#8211; or at least
me &#8211; during the process of composition itself. Another distinction within the
framework of my own project was that this was my portion of the piece was
written directly on the typewriter &#8211; the only other section of <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Alphabet</i> so composed are the prose
paragraphs in &quot;Force.&quot; I would type a paragraph and send it to Rae in
the mail. She would add one and send it back. We suggested revisions to one
another's paragraphs &amp; played off of the themes as they arose &#8211; my
helicopters were a direct translation of her angels, for example. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>We
also discussed paragraphs over the phone and, at one <span class=GramE>point,</span>
Rae simply rejected one of my paragraphs as too something, too tacky perhaps. I
sulked for a few days, then wrote another paragraph (no, I can't tell which one
it is today). Materials entered into the process at odd angles. For instance,
the sentence that reads &quot;How will I know when I make a mistake&quot; was a
comment that </span><st1:PersonName><span style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:
 "Times New Roman"'>Bob Perelman</span></st1:PersonName><span style='font-family:
Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'> originally made to me about my
own writing processes &#8211; I was always bemused at Bob&#8217;s stance on this, as I&#8217;ve
always wanted a poetry in which &#8220;mistakes&#8221; were includable &#8211; but I believe that
it was Rae who inserted the sentence into the final text. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>There
is at least one noteworthy antecedent for a poet bringing collaboration into a
longpoem, Celia <span class=SpellE>Zukfosky's</span> composition of <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&quot;A&quot;-24,</i> using her husband's
texts but without any other visible input from him into her process. In some
sense, I always felt that she solved a problem that had stymied Louis. For me,
that text has always raised a lot of issues, both for what it says about LZ&#8217;s
incapacity when confronted with the end of a lifework and for the too-pat
conclusion it gives to a work that really reaches its apotheosis in the great
pair of pieces that are <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>&quot;A&quot;-22 </i>and
<i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>-23.</i> Maybe I don't know when I make a
mistake, but I have some sense about Zukofsky in this regard. <o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>&nbsp;<o:p></o:p></span></p>

<p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>Whenever
I've worked on collaborations, dating back to the literary card games I played
with David Melnick &amp; </span><st1:PersonName><span style='font-family:Arial;
 mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>Rochelle Nameroff</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'> back at UC
Berkeley &#8211; one of which made it into my first book <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Crow </i>&#8211; or later with Darrell Gray or later still in the composition
of <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Legend</i> with Ray <span
class=SpellE>Di</span> Palma, Bruce Andrews, </span><st1:PersonName><span
 style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>Steve
 McCaffery</span></st1:PersonName><span style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:
"Times New Roman"'> &amp; </span><st1:PersonName><span style='font-family:Arial;
 mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>Charles Bernstein</span></st1:PersonName><span
style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'> &#8211; talk about
writers with difference processes! &#8211; or with Lyn Hejinian, </span><st1:PersonName><span
 style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>Barrett
 Watten</span></st1:PersonName><span style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:
"Times New Roman"'> &amp; Michael Davidson in <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:
normal'>Leningrad</i> or the larger collective process that has lurked behind <i
style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>The Grand Piano</i>, I've been struck not
only with a sense that a collaboration is <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>always</i>
about what happens in a poem when the individual consciousness of a poet
surrenders control, but also by the observation that almost all good writers
are what we used to refer to back in the 1960s as raging control freaks, me
most of all. This of course creates a certain shall we say tension in the age
of reader participation in the construction of any text's meaning. What happens
when this participation isn't simply only something that the poet &quot;factors
in&quot; to the composition of a text, but actually shows up &amp; plans to
write the next line? The breezy <span class=SpellE>collabs</span> of the </span><st1:place><st1:PlaceName><span
  style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>New York</span></st1:PlaceName><span
 style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'> </span><st1:PlaceType><span
  style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'>School</span></st1:PlaceType></st1:place><span
style='font-family:Arial;mso-bidi-font-family:"Times New Roman"'> always struck
me as never confronting that particular issue &#8211; I'm sure they might say that
this is because they were never half <span class=GramE>so</span> uptight as I
was &#8211; but for myself, these pieces have always been opportunities to explore
the boundaries of self &amp; other within the immanence of a textual
&quot;voice.&quot; <i style='mso-bidi-font-style:normal'>Engines </i>presented
me with an opportunity to test this thinking with the strongest poet I know.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Odds &amp; Ends<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">*****************************************<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">I will be reading in <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span class="GramE"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">the</span></b></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span></b><st1:place><st1:placetype><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Temple</span></b></st1:placetype><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> </span></b><st1:placename><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Writers</span></b></st1:placename></st1:place><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> Series, <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Temple Gallery, <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<st1:address><st1:street><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">45 North 2nd Street</span></b></st1:street><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">, </span></b><st1:city><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Philadelphia</span></b></st1:city></st1:address><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">,<o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">Thursday, February 27<sup>th</sup>. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">The reading is at </span></b><st1:time hour="20" minute="0"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">8:00
 PM</span></b></st1:time><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"> and is free to the public. <o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">*****************************************<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">An email from Rae Armantrout
on the apophatic:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Dear Ron, <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">My sense of the "apophatic" is not so much that
one "says the unsaid" as that one concentrates upon the unsayable.
It's the same impulse that makes figurative art blasphemous in Moslem cultures.
I think that in </span><st1:country-region><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">China</span></st1:place></st1:country-region><span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"> they say one can never see the
entire dragon and in many cultures (Judaism included) to see God is to die. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Speaking of Goddess culture, it is also lethal to catch
Artemis at her bath as I recall. (Of course, I could be wrong.) But I think the
idea that you can express the unsaid/unsayable in a human symbolic system
(directly at least) is contrary to the apophatic way. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">Rae <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">*****************************************</b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I recently lavished <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_02_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2388845701">praise</a>
&#8211; well-earned &#8211; on </span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Kevin
 Davies</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217; new poem
&#8220;Lateral Argument,&#8221; which at the time was unpublished. K. Silem Mohammad
followed suit with his own equally enthusiastic <a href="http://limetree.blogspot.com/2003_02_09_limetree_archive.html#88925001">review</a>.
The poem itself is now <a href="http://members.rogers.com/alterra/davies.htm">available</a>
in the new <span class="SpellE">Alterran</span> Poetry Assemblage for all to see.
I heartily recommend it. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">*****************************************</b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;"><o:p></o:p></span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I also <a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2003_01_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2387677185">praised</a>
</span><st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">Tom Raworth</span></st1:personname><span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Collected
Poems</i> for the marvelous volume it is. Readers can now find a list of errata
that have been spotted in the text <a href="http://tomraworth.com/typoscoll.html">here</a>. There are less than 20
for a book well over 500 pages long. As someone who has always believed
Sherrill Jaffe&#8217;s admonition that scars make your body more interesting, I&#8217;m
impressed with how error-free the volume actually is. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<h2 class='date-header'><span>Saturday, November 09, 2002</span></h2>

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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Arial;">First thought, best thought<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">I&#8217;ve always been interested
in the poem&#8217;s relationship to the process of thinking &amp; often see poems as
documents of that process. From Kerouac&#8217;s speed-ridden prose scroll through
Olson&#8217;s sometimes stumbling forward, using enjambment<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">&nbsp; </span>&amp; variable line length in his poems to
lurch towards an idea, to Ginsberg&#8217;s transcription of audio tapes in &#8220;Wichita
Vortex Sutra&#8221; or Duncan&#8217;s wrong-headed insistence that his final book appear
typed rather than typeset so as to capture best what the poet thought he was
doing at that instant, I&#8217;ve been drawn to works that often are written so as to
appear unfinished, in progress, the poetic equivalent I suppose of &#8220;distressed&#8221;
furniture or pre-faded jeans.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">Not surprisingly, then, I
think of myself as somebody who doesn&#8217;t revise much in my own poetry. So I was
surprised this past <span class="GramE">Spring</span> doing a little tour of the
Southwest (Tucson &amp; San Diego) when a woman at one of the events insisted
that my own writing process appeared to be one of total revision. What I do in
practice &#8211; and this pretty much has been the process for the past few years &#8211;
is to gather individual sentences into a notebook (of late, into a Palm Pilot)
until I have a decent number of them, at least 100, sometimes as many as 150. I
then sit down with whatever notebook I&#8217;m using and with my trusty (if rusty)
old Waterman felt-tip pen that I bought at a stationer&#8217;s just down from <span class="SpellE">Zabar&#8217;s</span> on the Upper West Side of Manhattan back in 1981
and use those sentences to compose the next passage of whichever work is at
hand. Sometimes I&#8217;ll use just a few sentences, but other times it might be a
fair number. On rare occasions, I&#8217;ll insert some sentence that occurs to me
during this process, usually out of a sense that &#8220;this sentence belongs
right here.&#8221; Once the number of raw sentences &#8220;in the hopper&#8221; drops down to a
certain level, however, somewhere around 80, I seem to need to stop, there no
longer being enough raw material from which to select. From the Palm Pilot to
the notebook, I do make significant changes, even rewriting the basic sentence,
although this occurs maybe in no more than five percent of the sentences I
eventually use. &amp; it&#8217;s possible for a sentence to &#8220;hang out&#8221; in the Palm
Pilot (or the pocket notebooks &amp; Sharp Organizer that I used before that)
for perhaps two years or more before I decide that I really must not be
intending to use that sentence. One the notebook itself is &#8220;complete&#8221; (&amp; my
definition of what that means changes from project to project)<span class="GramE">,</span> I type the poem into the PC. At this level, I change well
under a single word per page &#8211; and this is what I&#8217;m thinking about when I say
that I don&#8217;t make much use of revision. From end to end, this process can
easily take years. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">The argument that this one
questioner put to me was that the revision was in the translation from Palm
Pilot into the notebook. I&#8217;ve been mulling that idea over for </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">mont</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">hs &amp; it still makes me furrow my brow. At some
level, I don&#8217;t think I&#8217;ve committed to the sentence until I get it into the
notebook &#8211; I have no idea, even intuitively, where or how it might be used, <span class="GramE">the</span> context into which I will finally place it. So it
doesn&#8217;t feel to me that I&#8217;m actually writing poetry until I have my Waterman in
hand with a physical notebook.* How then could that be a process of revision?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;">One of my favorite poets in
the universe, Rae Armantrout, however, has a radically different approach to
the question. Revision plays a strategic role in her writing process, perhaps
its most critical element. Armantrout tries out an almost infinite number of
possible combinations before committing to even the shortest passage. In
addition, Armantrout is one poet who uses what any marketer or product
development specialist would recognize as a focus group as part of her process.
She sends draft versions of poems to a handful of friends, <span class="GramE">myself</span>
among them, asking for our response, advice, possible revisions, etc. She used
to do this in person when we lived not so far from one another in </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">San Francisco</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">, then by mail for many years after she and her
family moved back to </span><st1:city><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">San
  Diego</span></st1:place></st1:city><span style="font-family: Arial;">. With
email, however, the process has accelerated. There have been instances in which
I&#8217;ve received four different versions of a single </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">tex</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">t within the space of one hour. And while I &amp; the
other members of the feedback team (or however Armantrout thinks of us) have
over the years learned to be fearless in the suggestions we can &amp; do make &#8211;
a less confident poet would be crushed by some of the things we say &#8211; my sense
is that Armantrout almost always does exactly what she herself intended to do
with the poem, using us as much as anything as a means of clarifying her own
thinking about the text. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">One side effect of this
process for me is that I often see so many versions of a single poem that I
have no clear idea in my mind which version Armantrout eventually settled on
until I see the work in print. Sometimes it&#8217;s a version that&#8217;s slightly
different from every version I&#8217;ve seen. No one is more surprised by
Armantrout&#8217;s poetry in a new volume than I am. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Today about dawn I was
reading a passage in Frank Stanford&#8217;s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://writing.upenn.edu/epc/mirrors/ronsilliman.blogspot.com/2002_09_01_ronsilliman_archive.html%2381229839">The
Battlefield Where the Moon Says I Love You <span style="font-style: normal;">i</span></a></i>n
which the writing is, as often it is in this fabulous book, delightfully
over-the-top:<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
&lt;![if !supportLineBreakNewLine]&gt;<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
&lt;![endif]&gt;<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
God has lost so
much blood now he can&#8217;t speak he had to go to giving</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">hand</span> signals like a deaf and dumb man</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">all</span> was silent as a winter pond silent and untrue like a
featherless arrow</div>
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<span class="GramE">like</span> a shaft of sleeping wine beneath a tree the rotting
teeth</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">and</span> the dreaming knife and my dreams still ricocheting so
close</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">and</span> so far apart like journeys into space like the fast
madness</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">of</span> butcherbirds like field mice and toads and grass snakes
all of them</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">with</span> holes in their head have you seen that bird beating the
<st1:state><st1:place>minn</st1:place></st1:state>ow</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">against</span> the branch he&#8217;s got him by the tail the eyes of the <st1:state><st1:place>minn</st1:place></st1:state>ow
like rubies</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">tin</span> lids with their duets under the creek in the moonlight</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">like</span> planetoids who <st1:state><st1:place>nev</st1:place></st1:state>er
make it weep for the children with their bellies</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">buzzing</span> like a hornets&#8217; nest full of <span class="SpellE">snakeskins</span>
made by the sparrow</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">the</span> pieces of stars passing my ship</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">so</span> slowly I can reach out and touch them if I could</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
I lay in
slumber charged with death</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">stuck</span> like a sword in a battleground giving its aria</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">like</span> a dancer coming to life</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">in</span> the solar ditch I ask the sailor of space touch one</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">finger</span> with the other like a symphony the blessed legend in
the void all over</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">again</span> o how we died</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">centuries</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">ago</span> we slept friends I tell you I heard the oboes that
belong to the wolf</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">the</span> opera two steps from the blues the light years boogie
all the </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">time</span> I heard the blind tiger guitar so that is how it goes
how my dreams</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">those</span> sad captains</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span class="GramE">treat</span> me the <span class="SpellE">unkept</span> rendezvous
with the void which is black the pocketknives</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; text-indent: -.25in;">
I lose in
infinity those blades of grass that cut you in the dark</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">&#8220;Those sad captains&#8221; stopped
me cold, although I&#8217;d already tripped over the reference to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Peter and the Wolf </i>three lines earlier.
Is Stanford here alluding to Marc <span class="SpellE">Antony</span>? <span class="GramE">To Thom Gunn?</span> <span class="GramE">To the sentimental story by
Sarah <span class="SpellE">Orne</span> Jewett?</span> Is it something that just
popped into his head from the overheard &amp; undigested language of everyday
life? If I had to guess, I&#8217;d wager Shakespeare, but, like the allusion to
Prokofiev, the intrusion of any sort of book learning is so curiously <span class="GramE">Other</span> in this text that it can only send shivers through the
poem, a <span class="SpellE">memento</span> <span class="SpellE">mori</span> to the
preliterate society Stanford is exploring. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">These lines are filled with
phrases that don&#8217;t bear too much probing &#8220;like planetoids who </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">nev</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">er make it,&#8221; &#8220;the blind tiger guitar,&#8221; &#8220;the sailor of
space,&#8221; etc., yet collectively work because they&#8217;re so consistently excessive. It&#8217;s
more that these gaudy phrases mark the speed of writing than they do any point
of reference within. When one does suddenly resonate with meaning, the impact
can be dazzling. For me, this whole passage is completely justified by giving
occasion to &#8220;like a sword in a battleground giving its aria.&#8221; <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Arial;">Without ever having seen the
original manuscript of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Battlefield</i>, I
would suspect that it doesn&#8217;t show much in the way of revision &#8211; other than
possibly </span><st1:state><st1:place><span style="font-family: Arial;">del</span></st1:place></st1:state><span style="font-family: Arial;">etions &amp; insertions of entire sections. It&#8217;s not
the sort of poem that could ever be tidied up. Yet if what revision represents
is the function of critical thinking in the act of composition &#8211; which is what
I come up with, thinking of how radically differently I proceed through the
writing process compared with someone like Rae Armantrout &#8211; then revision in
this sense must already be present in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Battlefield</i>.
There is something in Stanford&#8217;s imagination that told him when &amp; how to
bring in extraneous information, whether it&#8217;s oboes or Marc <span class="SpellE">Antony</span>,
and ultimately it doesn&#8217;t matter if Stanford &#8220;got it right&#8221; or not. In this
poetry, neatness doesn&#8217;t count. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;">* I&#8217;m
totally weird &amp; neurotic about notebooks as well, but that&#8217;s a topic for
another time. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial; font-size: 10.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; </span>But this does raise the question of
what I think I&#8217;m doing when I&#8217;m writing/collecting sentences into my Palm or a
pocket notebook. Research, perhaps. I don&#8217;t at that point in the process have
any commitment, emotional or otherwise, to the sentences collected. &amp; I&#8217;ve
gathered them under conditions that felt like the furthest thing from &#8220;writing
poetry&#8221; &#8211; in the middle of business meetings, while driving, twice while
undergoing eye surgery. Whereas &#8220;writing poetry&#8221; for me has an emotional feel
to it that is very little changed from the days as a kid when I would sit on my
bed in my room with a spiral-bound notebook in hand, writing away with some
kind of deep pleasure. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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