Rae Armantrout Saturday, April 17, 2010

Rae Armantrout won the Pulitzer Prize! I offer this as news in case you haven't been reading Ron Silliman's blog, which right now looks a little like a wine and liquor factory outlet, if wine and liquor were Rae Armantrout.

Isn't it strange how the Language Poets split into really good and really dumb factions, and all the good ones were women? Is this some concrete legacy of feminism? The demand that the abstractions of law answer to the body?

I won't say. The last time I was around a big group of poets and mentioned my recent successful efforts to fund my entry in an MFA program, one of them--someone who's always been friendly to me, who knows I'm a poet-- asked me in a fakey voice whether or not I was going into fiction. A fair question under normal circumstances, but I took it as a slight for my having recently written stabs in the direction of the elderly avant-garde. No mas, I'm done. I don't have the weight to throw around, I'm spent. I mean from here on out to shower love, pity and affection upon my peers, to cradle their weak, babylike heads in their time of need, to touch sugar water to their parched, anemic lips.

My question is, where are Lyn Heijinian's epaulets? The gauntlet comes down here. Her work from the seventies culminating in My Life is the best work done by anyone in that decade, and I'm including John Ashbery.

Anyway, congrats to Armantrout. Though big-time book prizes, like sausages, do not bear close scrutiny, in this case a good author is getting her due. Start with the book for which she earned the award, Versed, and then work your way back. Veil is currently the only survey of her work, though I suspect there is a Collected Poems on the way for this newly notable presence.

This is Rae Armantrout, from The Boston Review:

The Fit


In a fit of repugnance
each moment
rips itself in half,

producing a twin.

*

In a coming-of-age story
each dream
produces me:

an ignorance
on the point of revelation.

*

I'm at a side table

in a saloon
in Alaska,

my eye on the door
where a flood of strangers
pours in.

*

The door or the window?

It's morning.