Poets tend to form loose groups - the "Romantics" or the "Imagists". And sometimes they write manifestoes in the name of these groups. This can be good. It forces the poet and the audience to think. But it can also be dangerous. It can turn into a branding device so that potential readers believe they know all they need to know once they know you've been associated with a certain group or position. It can freeze things in place. That's where thinking stops.

Rae Armantrout

Categorized in : Thinking Believe Writing

Poetry wants to make things mean more than they mean, says someone, as if we knew how much things meant, and in what unit of measure.

Rae Armantrout

units want mean

Metaphor is ritual sacrifice. It kills the look-alike. No, metaphor is homeopathy.

Rae Armantrout

metaphor sacrifice looks

But here I hold your dream in my poem.

Rae Armantrout

your-dreams dream

As for the differences between audio and the printed page, the sonic aspects of poetry are important to me. I read my poems aloud to myself as I'm composing them. And I enjoy reading to an audience. I think people get tone more easily when they hear a writer read her work. Some people have told me they hear more humor in my poems at a live reading than when they see them on the page. I think that may be a matter of pacing. On the other hand, I've listened to a lot of poetry readings and I know how much you can miss. If you stop to really register one line, you miss the next three or so.

Rae Armantrout

reading people thinking

Curled up in bed,

Rae Armantrout

bed young way

I know you by your willingness.

Rae Armantrout

willingness knows

This is a strange book: visionary and dark. It stutters out a kind of music: repeated phrases which accumulate errors and mutate as they go like chromosomes or, as Woodward puts it better, 'visible fissile ribbons.' It's as if we were present for the moments of creation and extinction. Uncanny Valley is ominous and beautiful.

Rae Armantrout

dark beautiful book

I am attracted to looking at the different things language can mean even in one sometimes quite ordinary utterance. Writing is partly about listening closely to yourself as you think or compose and being aware of the different tensions and weights among the words, the different directions any one of them could lead. I like to play with the multiplicity and instability of meaning partly out of a sense of adventure, to see where that takes me and partly in a whistling past the graveyard kind of way because, of course, sensing stable meaning fall away can be scary.

Rae Armantrout

adventure mean fall

Lily Brown writes with and against things in poems that are coiled up tight as springs (or snakes). A believer in the power of the line, she writes, 'I think the plastics/and sink them' then 'Where is the sand/man hiding the dirt.' These terse, biting poems will make you look around and wonder.

Rae Armantrout

writing spring men

clarity need not be equivalent to / readability. How readable is the world?

Rae Armantrout

poetry world needs

We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.

Rae Armantrout

discourse half mean

I tend to like the way poets form communities. Writing can be lonely after all. Modern life can be lonely. Poets do seem to be more social than fiction writers. This could be because of poetry's roots in the oral tradition - poetry is read aloud and even performed. I'm just speculating, of course. At any rate, because poets form these groups, they learn from one another. That is one of the best things about being a poet.

Rae Armantrout

community lonely writing

Carried by light, images remain while sensation is so evanescent as to be always beyond belief.

Rae Armantrout

sensations light belief

Like all my poems, 'Negotiations' has several sources. It deals with aging lovers and the often silent deals they make. Thinking about bargains made me think of The Little Mermaid and that made me remember something I had just read about the incredibly complex process by which tadpoles (actual little mermaids) are somehow able to reabsorb their tails and fashion their future frog legs.

Rae Armantrout

mermaid fashion thinking

The fear that all this will end. The fear that it won't.

Rae Armantrout

ends

People probably long for something genuinely personal in a society where the personal is often indistinguishable from the "personalized." Maybe the poetry audience member is searching for his or her own "personal space" and they expect the poet to be a sort of avatar of the private life. But that sort of representation is distasteful to me. Asking a poet to represent the personal life is, paradoxically, to turn the poet into something other than a person.

Rae Armantrout

poet long people

The future is all around here.' It's a place, anyplace where we don't exist.

Rae Armantrout

Like most of my poems, 'Lie' has several sources: I read a very troubling book called The Sixth Extinction. I took note of the way people, including me, enjoy talking knowledgeably about how the world will end. I drove to Tucson and saw the desert flowering on either side of the road. And I glanced at my spam to see what people wanted to sell me these days.

Rae Armantrout

talking book lying

We sleep together in the dark but confuse light with love.

Rae Armantrout

light dark sleep

The crowd is made of little gods, and there is still no heaven.

Rae Armantrout

crowds littles heaven