David Melnick and I were riding a BART train that seemed far more tattered & worn than I had remembered them, the screech of the under-the-bay-tunnel making it difficult to hear one another, while David thumbed through his newly acquired copy of Rae Armantrout’s Next Life. “She’s still true to the same values,” David said. “She loves those words with short vowels. All those as and ifs.”

I knew what David meant. We had just come from hearing Rae read with Leslie Scalapino, a superb performance on both their parts. Leslie had read from a couple of books, one of them being (I think) Day Ocean State of Star’s Night, forthcoming from Green Integer Press, another being ‘Can’t’is ‘Night’ and other poems, not a book but a CD from stemrecordings.com. I had heard in Leslie’s reading something I’d not considered before with regard to her writing, its affinity for the work of Larry Eigner. In Eigner’s work you are never very far – seldom more than a word or a few syllables – from the immediate. One reads – or at least I read (and my hearing Scalapino again reminded me why I think this) – her work with a similar sense of the phenomenological present. Sentences often change direction or angle off in ways not anticipated, certainly by the syntax, but because decisions & priorities must be made in the now which is constantly shifting, always in question. There is an urgency to the work that I find I trust completely and am willing to let her go further than almost any other writer before I insist on some sense of return (not the same thing as “making sense,” for the record).

And I’d heard the short vowels in Armantrout’s poems to which Melnick had been alluding. It’s an aspect of her writing I associate, to be honest, with George Oppen, who similarly preferred those vowels and knew it. (I know that I’ve told the story more than once of standing next to Robert Duncan at a reading at Glide Church when Mark Linenthal brought Oppen up to introduce him to Duncan. This shocked me at the time because, being but a callow lad, I thought surely all the famous poets knew one another. Oppen’s first remark to Duncan was “I want to talk to you about all those open vowels in your work,” the implication being that he did not find them as mellifluous as Duncan. I only wish I could remember what Robert replied!)

I turned to my copy of Next Life and read “Some,” a poem that, in fact, Armantrout had not read at Moe’s, just listening for the vowels:

Someone insists on forming sentences
on my pillow
when all I want is sleep:

marching orders,
wisecracks about others elsewhere.

I’d like to kill her
but I’m told it’s she

who must go on
at all cost.

*

The old cat casts her eye
about the carpet near her,
jerkily,
preparing to lick herself.

*

A sense of mission      lost
in ink’s
jagged outcrops.

I try to tell myself
what I must have known
before

in a form
I wouldn’t recognize at first.

*

Blinksmanship.

Bright ranks of
                    of

slip rapidly
over bars of it.

Blank-pedaling.

Long live illumined
oblongs

with this shuttling
                        cross-hatch

I don’t know if a linguistic atlas would identify the rate of long-to-short vowels generally and, if so, just how far a poem like the above might deviate from the norm, whether it be nationally, from Armantrout’s lifelong San Diego home, or even the “edge of the south” states (Missouri to Oklahoma) from which her parents emigrated.

It’s not that Armantrout doesn’t use long vowels here, so much as it is that she uses them to set up effects that land more directly on the short ones. Thus, for example, the two long syllables in old and eye in the second section (reiterated by the shorter version of a long vowel at the end of jerkily) aurally set up the last line: preparing to lick herself. Indeed, the key word of the last line, lick, can be found inverted as the second syllable of jerkily, whose k sound has already been set up by cat, cast and carpet. The way Armantrout sets up these minute effects is a pleasure to watch.

Similarly the long vowels of Bright ranks set up not just the double of / of, but are part of the gradual build-up for the brilliant final sentence, whose lone long vowel is the ē in –ing. That’s a wonderful sentence to read aloud: Long live illumined / oblongs etc.

Obviously, Armantrout is no sound poet – she consistently uses it to reinforce arguments, to suggest ironies, to set a sense of tonal color. But it’s always an active dimension of the work, part of the great pleasure in reading (and in hearing her read) her poetry.

One poem in Next Life that strikes me as revealing a good deal about how Rae Armantrout weaves her verbal magic is called “Close”:

1.

As if a single scream
gave birth

to whole families
of traits

such as “flavor,” “color,”
“spin”

and this tendency to cling.


2

Dry, white frazzle
in a blue vase –

beautiful –

a frozen swarm
of incommensurate wishes.


3

Slow, blue, stiff
are forms

of crowd behavior,

mass hysteria.

Come close.

The crowd is made of
little gods

and there is still
no heaven

Formally, the first two sections are built up out of incomplete sentences, the first a dependent clause, the second a complex noun phrase, while the third section entails three short sentences. The second of these three sentences consists of just two words addressing the reader, and is the one from which Armantrout has claimed her title, so that the title functions as a kind of caption, highlighting just this moment in the text.

The first section is almost archetypal Armantrout, invoking as it does her favorite social form, the family, suggesting at one point the violence of childbirth, at a second the ontological status of categories &, finally, a deep emotion that may (or may not) signal dysfunctionality. The “As if” sets the entire section atilt, so that we don’t read “gave birth” for what in some ways it is, the true verb phrase of all that follows. Armantrout pulls back on this verb, I think, precisely to foreground what follows.

One might read the second section as the simplest of metaphors – Armantrout avoids using the word flowers at the end of the first line, replacing it with a quality very much in keeping with the ones that appeared in quotation marks in the previous sections. Then she offers this same sense of the qualitative again, this time in a more conventional (and, here, italicized) mode: beautiful. The final couplet appears again to offer us the same image without actually deploying the noun flowers. Note the three stages of her depiction – the first suggests motion while stopping it, the second implies plurality &, not coincidentally suggests bees so as to reinforce the image of what is not said, but the last line brings in – as had the last line of the first section – emotion & specifically emotion that has somehow gone beyond. The parallelism of the first two sections, these incomplete sentences ending in periods, is nearly as important as what is being said.

The third section’s first sentence could be read – in fact, it would be hard not to – as tho it also were a depiction of flowers and/or a roster of “traits.” The idea that such traits represent crowd behavior takes us back not only to the frozen swarm of the previous section, but to the whole families of the first. Characterizing them as mass hysteria again calls up the scream of the first section, the incommensurate emotion of the second. All of this thus far is built, for all purposes, around a single image of flowers in a vase. No wonder then that Armantrout wants us to look closely.

So that the final pair of couplets, the last complete sentence (albeit the first one to close with no period) offers us that which is incommensurate, that these are, flower by flower (child by child) little gods born into a universe in which there is still / no heaven.

If, as a reader, you aren’t paying close attention, a poem like this goes down so easily & lightly. But if, instead, you read it three, four, ten times, the depths, the cohesion, the themes & their underlying starkness will exhaust you.

This is a story that Armantrout explores over & over. On the page immediately prior to “Close” is a simpler version, entitled “Blur”:

I’m called home
but don’t go.

I have enough past
and future

to accompany me now.

The solitary one
interferes with itself.

They should give up
                     counting.

Four simple sentences divided across five stanzas. That third stanza, lone line, would in fact function as a kind of formal hinge if only Armantrout hadn’t pushed that last one-word line in the final couplet out to the right (which I suspect is why she did that). The first two sentences start with “I,” but the last two turn in different directions. The third would appear to talk about the narrator in the third-person. The fourth, tho, uses the most mysterious of words here, They, reminding us that someone or something in the first line of poem must have been doing the calling, but without us ever know just who it might be.

At one level, I think it’s easy to read this as a poem about death, about accepting the limits of one’s life, but at another level it appears to be about obligation, perhaps family responsibility, and the resistance that is the self, that may in fact be what defines the self. That at least is how I read what I take to be the key word in this poem, interferes. It’s a wonderful choice of words, suggesting exactly the push-pull dynamic that I think Armantrout is after.

But what then do we make of the title “Blur.” It’s not a caption like “Close” but suggests something else, perhaps that very push-pull dynamic or possibly even the figure implied by They. It’s a title that I relate – and this may be my own projection here – to the cover image of Next Life, a photograph by Albert von Schrenk-Notzing of “The medium Eva C. with a materialization on her head and a luminous apparition between her hands, 17 May 1912.” The materialization looks like a little cap, too small for Eva C’s head & at an angle that makes no sense. The apparition looks like an electrified thread, glowing mid-air.

There is, I think, a serious sociological dimension to such off-shoots of random spirituality as the ectoplasm-seeking psychics or the 19^th century movement that gathered around, say, forms such as theosophy, aspects of spirituality seeking new modes of expression in an Enlightenment universe. I don’t think that Armantrout is interested in that. But I do think she wants to investigate, in almost every poem here, the role of spirituality in a world that is no longer god-infested, tho without particularly investigating all the ways its usual expression, religion, leaves vast swaths of devastation in its wake. It’s not that Armantrout sees no devastation, but for that she usually employs a different model, that of the family.

There is something about the construction of a book as object that ensures that a 78-page hard-cover volume of poems will appear to be “slender” in ways that a comparable paperback original will not. This makes it possible, I think, to mistake Rae Armantrout’s new book, Next Life, for something more frail, less searing in its intensity, maybe less fierce in its intelligence, than it really is. At least until you open the cover. When you do that, the best analogy may just be an improvised explosive device.

I’ve been reading Rae Armantrout’s poetry now, almost daily as it happens, for close to forty years. I’ve seen most of these poems in various stages of composition as well – Armantrout is perfectly capable of trying 20 different variations on the same two or three lines until she gets one that is, from a reader’s perspective, completely unsettling. At the same time, Armantrout writes the “simplest,” and “most clear” poems of any of the language poets. But consider this, which is in fact titled “Clear”:

An old woman is being led through the parking lot by two girls. They hold her hands and speak in energetic, explanatory bursts while she cranks her head this way and that as if expecting something which has yet to appear.

As if the crystalline clarity of this ocean pool, cradled in two lava arms, meant something which we had been waiting to hear, something indistinguishable from meaning itself, and unchanging, so that, finally, it’s we who turn to go.

How can a poem that is just three sentences, two paragraphs, two images, be at once as clear as the pool cradled in two lava arms and so completely enigmatic? At one level, I read this as tho watching a magic trick. I watch it over & over & still can’t see how the card or the coin or the suddenly released white dove reappears. I think there’s a correlation at some deeply pre-rational level between those two lava arms and the “old woman” that completely transforms the analogy, rendering it simultaneously three-dimensional & entirely mysterious. Because you couldn’t diagram it if you tried.

That mystery, the unnamable, a persistent dread, is a constant in Armantrout’s work, never far from the suburban mall surfaces she renders with greater accuracy than anyone in my generation. Consider, again, the relation of ants to war and – especially! – to mother in this poem just two pages further in. Or, for that matter, televised. It’s entitled, rather in the classic Armantrout manner, “Yonder”:

1


Anything cancels
everything out.

If each point
is a singularity,

thrusting all else
aside for good,

”good” takes the form
of a throng
of empty chairs.

Or it’s ants
swarming a bone.


2


I’m afraid
I don’t love
my mother
who’s dead

though I once –
what does “once” mean? –
did love her.

So who’ll meet me over yonder?
I don’t recognize the place names.

Or I do, but they come
from televised wars.

Now go back and explain the function & meaning of that first couplet. I don’t think that’s possible, not in any easy sense, but it’s essential to the construction of meaning in this poem.

One notices in Next Life a shift in direction in Armantrout’s concerns, which have been fairly consistent going back to her first book, Extremities. The social commentary of the cultural quotidian, the surrealism of the mall and suburban “commercial strips” has almost entirely dropped away. What remains are the sort of short, intense philosophical poems that are the ones that remind some of Armantrout’s readers not of any affinity with language poetry, but with the work of her most direct ancestor, Emily Dickinson. I won’t be surprised if some readers aren’t ambivalent about this new, sharper focus. And I won’t even be shocked if someone doesn’t decide to declare Armantrout to be a spiritual, if not religious, poet either. But I do think it will be impossible for people to read these poems and think of her as a “slight” or even “fun” read – the poems may sometimes look like the work, say, of Robert Creeley or of a more recent writer like Graham Foust, but the intensity of Armantrout’s new poems can be draining on an attentive reader, even when she employs her well-loved sense of humor, as in “Remote”:

The breath coming
to rest

like a small frog
at the bottom of a fish tank,

then darting up to surface
now again,

is mine?

*


Remote and, by now, automated
distress calls fill the air.

*


Do you believe this?
Metaphor

shifts a small weight
there and back.

My self-reflection shames God
into watching

Considering what the possibilities are for an image to attach to that first section (my favorite is the head of the poet plunged into the aquarium, not just because it’s hysterically funny, but also because it reminds me in some perverse way of Adrienne Rich’s “Diving Into the Wreck”), the starkness of those last two lines make me want to sit up and say “Whoa!” I want to write that the word self-reflection is the key to this poem, but the use of the word small two lines before seems at least as pivotal, as does in the second section, the term automated. There’s not one wrong word in this poem. Indeed, there may not be one in this entire book.