Rae Armantrout's poetics

We wake up to an empty room
addressing itself in scare quotes.
(Rae Armantrout, from "Reversible")


The following are some interesting comments Charles Bernstein made in introducing Rae Armantrout at a recent reading; they touch on not only Armantrout's poetics but disjunctive or associative poetics in general. The comments are posted on his blog: http://epc.buffalo.edu/
authors/bernstein/blog/#03-17-09/

"Armantrout’s work is not surrealism, not realism, but para- or peri-realism: it is constructed of precisely articulated observations that seem to logically follow one another but that, like everyday life, don’t or better to say, don’t quite. Her rhythms are of dislocation and relocation. Armantrout’s signature is serial displacement: incommensurability torques from one iteration to another, like Marcel Marceau miming a mime miming. Such an approach can be used for many ends. Armantrout’s engagement is often social and cultural dysfunction, giving her work its dark undertones and muted overtones. In this way, she depicts the socio-cultural logic of late Capitalism; dark matter, indeed. So yeah, sure, please be sure to note: her work enacts, through its multifoliate insights, an ideological critique, as when you lose your balance but don’t fall; you realize something must be wrong but don’t know what. Preston Sturges said it best: if you can’t sleep at night, it’s not the coffee it’s the bunk.

So, yes, Armantrout is one of the grand masters of our beloved radical disjunction of the 1970s and 80s. If one were to chart the vectors of each of her lines, you would get a field of skewed angles. Her motto might be: One perception must lead tangentially to the next. But tangential is not arbitrary or disconnected. Tangential is the mark of contingency but also motivated relation. To follow associative and peripheral connections – non-rationalizable, nonexpository, non-narrative – offers a constantly reiterated possibility of new perceptions.

Next to us is not the world we know so well, which we use to do our bidding, but the world that could be, the world we might make. I jump the line because I am so tired of waiting in it. . . ."


Let's jump the line and into that space of tangential perception, between one line and the next.

Anagrams

Interesting (but probably very slow) technique. See method in Author's Note below. Results at:

http://www.unf.edu/mudlark/mudlark30/contents.html

Author’s Note. Each of the poems in Anagrams of America is an anagram of its source text. All of the letters of the source text have been used, once and only once, in the composition of the corresponding poem. No letters have been added and no letters have been left out. Many of the sources are familiar works by familiar authors, and I have indicated below each poem the text used. Unless otherwise indicated, titles, epigraphs, section numbers, and section headings are not to be considered part of the anagram. — Mike Smith

MESHWORKS (Miami University Archive of Writing in Performance)

Bill Griffiths

This site has a great list of mp3's of poets reading: Bill Griffiths, Fanny Howe, Rae Armantrout, SoundEye (Irish sound poetry conference), Contemporary Experimental Women's Poetry Festival, and more.

http://www.orgs.muohio.edu/meshworks/index.html

Managable Imaginations

Hello all, check out the interview re: Suicide Psalms on Tracy Hamon's blog.

http://thamon.wordpress.com/2009/01/27/interview-with-mari-lou-rowley

Hilary, thanks for the google exercise. still haven't had time to try.

Keep warm. ML

Lyrical constraint-based poetry

Inger Christensen, a Danish poet, has just died. From Inger Christensen's Alphabet(1981):



...and Icarus, impotent Icarus exists;

Icarus swaddled in melting waxwings
exists; Icarus pale as a corpse in
civvies exists, Icarus all the way down where
the pigeons exist; dreamers, dolls
exist; the dreamers' hair with cancerous tufts
torn out, the dolls' skin pinned together
with nails, rotting wood of the mysteries; and smiles
exist, Icarus' children white as lambs
in the gray light, will indeed exist, indeed
we will exist, and oxygen on oxygen's crucifix;
as hoar-frost we will exist, as wind we will exist,
as the rainbow's iris, in the shining shoots of
mesembryanthenum, in the tundra's straw; small

we will exist, as small as bits of pollen in peat,
as bits of virus in bones, as swamp pink maybe
maybe as a bit of white clover, vetch, a bit of chamomile
exiled to the lost again paradise; but darkness
is white say the children, the darkness of paradise is white,
but not white as a a coffin is white,
that is if coffins exist, and not
white as milk is white,
that is if milk exists; white is white,
the children say, darkness is white, but not
white as the white existing
before fruit trees existed, their flowering so white,
darkness is whiter, eyes melt


Translated by Pierre Joris. From Poems for the Millenium II, ed. Pierre Joris and Jerome Rothenberg (and from the excerpt posted on Joris' blog "Nomadics" today). Alphabet is also available from New Directions (and a different translator).

Joris on Christensen's method in Alfabet: "Alfabet (1981) is a book-length poem using two reticulating systems: the alphabet (that adamic, prelapsarian state of language, as Roland Barthes suggests, because it is pre-word & pre-syntax, & thus before misuse, lying, rhetoric, polysemy are possible) & the Fibonacci series (where each number is the sum of the two previous ones, i.e.: 1,2,3,5,8,13,34,47,81,128...) Thus the first section of the poem is one line long and starts with an "A", the second 2 lines long, and starts with a "B", etcetera)" (see Joris blog).

Anthology of constraint-based writing

The /n/oulipian Analects

Edited by Matias Viegener and Christine Wertheim

Les Figues Press

From http://www.lesfigues.com/lfp/133/the-_n_oulipian-analects :

"The /n/oulipian Analects is an alphabetical survey of constrained writing in modern English. Editors Wertheim and Viegener gathered and arranged critical and creative pieces from some of the most prominent and influential constraint-based writers—Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, Johanna Drucker, Paul Fournel, Jen Hofer, Tan Lin, Bernadette Mayer, Ian Monk, Joseph Mosconi, Harryette Mullen, Doug Nufer, Vanessa Place, Janet Sarbanes, Juliana Spahr, Brian Kim Stefans, Rodrigo Toscano, Matias Viegener, Christine Wertheim, Rob Wittig, Stephanie Young—adding the unknown variable n to the great legacy of Oulipo. The result: an excellent mix of introductory basics for those new to constraint-based writing, blended with in-depth exposition and critique for those already avid readers and writers."

Barbara Guest -- poems and poetics

Just published:

The Collected Poems of Barbara Guest
Wesleyan UP, 2008









Here are some excerpts from essays on poetics by Guest:

From "Mysteriously Defining the Mysterious," HOW(ever) (1986):

"In whatever guise reality becomes visible, the poet withdraws from it into invisibility."

http://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/print_archive/alerts1086.html#barbara
(see Guest's EPC page)

***
From "Invisible Architecture" on Guest's EPC page:

"By whom or by what agency is the behavior of the poem suggested, by what invisible architecture, we ask, is the poem developed. The Surrealists taught us to wander freely on the page, releasing mechanical birds, if we so desire, to nest in the invisible handwriting of composition. There is always something within poetry that desires the invisible."

***
From "Wounded Joy" in American Poetry Review (2002):

"Do you ever notice as you write that no matter what there is on the written page something appears to be in back of everything that is said, a little ghost. I judge that this ghost is there to remind us there is always more, an elsewhere, a hiddenness, a secondary form of speech, an eye blink."

http://www.aprweb.org/issues/sept02/guest.html (see Guest's EPC page).