Product Description
Rae Armantrout has always organized her collections of poetry as though they were works in themselves. Versed brings two of these sequences together, offering readers an expanded view of the arc of her writing. The poems in the first section, Versed, play with vice and versa, the perversity of human consciousness. They flirt with error and delusion, skating on a thin ice that inevitably cracks: "Metaphor forms / a crust / beneath which / the crevasse of each experience." Dark Matter, the second section, alludes to more than the unseen substance thought to make up the majority of mass in the universe. The invisible and unknowable are confronted directly as Armantrout's experience with cancer marks these poems with a new austerity, shot through with her signature wit and stark unsentimental thinking. Together, the poems of Versed part us from our assumptions about reality, revealing the gaps and fissures in our emotional and linguistic constructs, showing us ourselves where we are most exposed. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (8)

Not my cup of tea....
I bought this book because of its recent Pulitzer win.I had read negative reviews before purchasing it, but didn't trust them; I supposed that the commentators I had read were probably just not appreciators of contemporary verse.I can be a bit of a snob, you see; I have a strong appreciation for poetry of many sorts, and consider myself to have fairly well developed taste in modern music, art, and literature.

I must apologize to the reviewers that I took to be Philistines: having now read the book myself, like the previous reviewers of this volume I must confess myself baffled by Armantrout's "Versed."

There are moments of great poignancy here; there are a few passages of real beauty...but the majority of the volume reads like unconnected gibberish on a page.(This from an avid reader of T.S. Eliot, Joyce, Eco...)I'm told that Armantrout's work derives from Language Poetry; that the verse is often disjunct, with strange and thought-provoking transitions that require much of the reader.This I am fairly comfortable with: I have a good background in dialectics; I understand polarizations, juxtapositions, pastiche techniques, quotational devices, etc. in music....What I don't understand is this: why those words rather than others?Why are these two images juxtaposed, rather than two others?What criteria could possibly be articulated to differentiate "good" language poetry from "bad" language poetry?

It's a problem of craftsmanship: one thing that the Darmstadt festival discovered (to take a musical example) is that the more systematically and carefully a piece of serial music is generated, the more random it sounds.How could a listener tell by ear whether it's Stockhausen's latest masterpiece or some configuration of monkeys at a piano?Back to "Versed": how would I know whether what I am looking at is a masterpiece of language poetry or unrelated sentences spliced together on a page, between which I am supposed to invent connections and deep meanings?

The best word to describe my response to this volume is simply "baffled"; I would not have given the volume much consideration at all if it hadn't been given the stamp of approval by such distinguished prize-awarding committees.As it is, I have tried and tried to see this volume as the committees saw it, to find its unifying elements, its positive qualities...and I just can't get it.I am torn by contradictory feelings - that I am missing something extraordinary that would emerge from "Versed" if only I were more receptive, or applied myself better to the poems, or had more of a background in language poetry; and that it really is just "the Emperor's new verse."

Pulitzer winner? Really?
Rae Armantrout, Versed (Wesleyan, 2009)

I have no idea what's wrong with me these days. I seem to have strayed far, far from the path where poetry is concerned. A couple of weeks ago I picked up W. S. Merwin's most recent Pulitzer Prizewinner, and I found it, to be short, dull as dishwater and twice as murky. Now I find myself having recently finished Rae Armantrout's Versed, not only a Pulitzer winner but also a National Book Critics Circle Award winner, and once again I find myself wondering what, exactly, these people are thinking. There are a thousand great American poets out there working today and getting no recognition at all, and the awards folks are recognizing... this?

Not to say the collection is all bad. There are a few scattered poems, mostly having to do with Armantrout's battle with cancer, that are grounded, fully-fleshed, and quite good. The rest of the collection, though, makes me think back five or six years. I'd submitted a bunch of hardcore-imagist stuff to a particular magazine, and got back a response saying they'd accepted all but one, rejecting that one because it was "too personal". I had no idea what the guy meant (since that particular batch I'd attempted to keep as much of the personal out of as possible, just reporting on disconnected images), but now I find myself wondering if that's not what's going on here; there are definitely threads of stuff connecting these poems, but (a) it's not usually images and (b) I can't make heads or tails out of most of it. Here's an entire segment from "Presto":

"Presto!//Pairs of flies/re-tie//the old knot/mid-air.///Blonde wigs and/wizard-caps.//"I want to go back!"//Invisible knot.//I want to be that!"

Okay, two entire segments (of three). And I should mention that this poem stands out because it actually ends with a punctuation mark. But seriously, can you make heads or tails of that? Obviously, folks on the Pulitzer and NBCC boards could, enough at least to laud it with prizes. But it makes me wonder why so many poets who are demonstrably better keep getting passed over for the biggest awards; a quick trip through the Wikipedia article on 2009 books of poetry (which covers maybe 1% of what was actually published) show releases from Rita Dove, Emily Wilson, Clay Matthews, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Jim Harrison, and Frederick Seidel, among others, all of whom are fantastic (the Wilson book is in the running for my best-I-read list this year). This, on the other hand, is momentarily amusing at best. * ½

A Structure Opposing Itself
I should admit first that my purpose is not necessarily to review "Versed" by Rae Armantrout, or her poetry in general, for that matter, since that would require an extensive structured study of her poetics. My concern is, however, to merely respond to some of the other reviews. Specifically, those reviews that complain about the collection being vague, fragmented, or, the biggest crime of all, purposeless.

One of the reviewers associates these poems with a sense of laziness, for apparently the poet did not put the effort to make the lines longer (as we often see in classical poems as they try to keep on with the rhythm and meter). I completely disagree with this point of view since if you read the poems once, with no concern of not understanding its purpose and god forbid feeling ignorant, you will realize the internal lyricism between the lines. The shortness of the lines not only does not deny the possibility of rhythm and lyricism, but they offer new possibilities, opportunities if i may call it so, of constructing the language of the poem anew by choosing the different correlations between the lines.

Yet, I don't consider this a major opposition since it is based on an (in)ability to read the poems through. The underlying cause of this, which at the same time seems to be the fundamental cause of the other oppositions as well, is the problem with the meaning. What is Rae Armantrout getting at? how does one have to make the connections between these fragments? and , ultimately, what is her purpose? And the inability to answer these questions, which by no means indicate that you have to know "all the correct answers", rather suggests that its you, the reader, who needs to retire from your laziness and actively involve with the poems.

Rae Armantrout is indeed a philosophical poet, and, in my mind, one of the greatest poets of our times in this sense. I would only mention two aspects of her poetry which makes it so scarce, and so precious at the same time. These two aspects are related to each other and may not be isolated from the entity that is her poems:

1) Rae Armantrout is interested in acquisitions. She is interested in the fundamental questions of philosophy. What is a subject? How is the subject different from an-other subject? What is the position of gender in the society? Are we all the same subjects or are we structurally the same. This is the fascinating dialectic that can be found in her thoughts. She approaches these issues through observations (experiences of life) and theory (the way we use our language to express ourselves). And if you think these are questions belonging to the past, you should re-think your idea of life. These very same questions are still being asked by the major philosophers of our time (such as Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, or Judith Butler).

2) Never does she assume the position of the all-knowing-subject herself. She proposes questions that many of us, if we become actively involved with our surroundings, would ask. She doesn't necessarily have an answer, or any answers for that matter, to her own questions, for her questions arise from not-knowing. If in classical poetry poets want to share their wisdom with the reader (even when it comes to those abstract ideas such as death or being), Armantrout on the other hand admits she knows nothing. She shares a question, whose answer may be found later, possibly by someone else other than her.

It's this latter aspect of her work which makes it especially important for me. We are so used to the position of the students whose schoolmaster so kindly transfers his/her knowledge to them that we have lost the motive to leave, even for a second, the position of a mere spectator.

Rae Armantrout speaks to the reader, not as a (platonic) schoolmaster, but she demands our active participation in these texts. She is asking us the questions she doesn't know the answer of, not to mock us or make us feel ignorant, but so that maybe through the participation of us, the readers, she would find some of her answers. And how intriguing would it be, if through this participation we, too, would realize our ignorance without feeling ashamed of it.

Elusive and beautiful
The meaning of many of these poems is elusive. Yes, this can make the reading a frustrating experience, but besides the display of wit there are frequent moments of great beauty and delicate but sharp insights about illness and impermanence.

Obscurity Without Purpose
There is a laziness to these poems, a fake rigor -- short sparse lines that imply lyric tension, but feel like no more than cocktail coaster jottings.Lots of vague pseudo-connections, hocus-pocus, imagistic smoke and mirrors -- and to what end?There is little here that speaks to an intelligent, receptive poetry audience.It is all word games, which we are told to believe contain some higher purpose and deeper meaning, indiscernible but ever-present.How the hocum that the academy has labeled "language poetry" has taken root would be hilarious if it were not such a destructive force in American literature.It undermines the appreciation of clear, powerful multi-textured poetry that is more depth than surface.Experimental, surreal, futurist poetry can be quite wonderful.The best of its practitioners, from Stevens to Eluard to Vallejo, spoke directly to their audience, however deflective or circular their language might initially appear.Its carefully wrought circularity leads the reader, or listener, into a labyrinth resonant with music of all sorts. Ms. Armantrout's verse, and its ilk, speaks to itself, unintelligibly and pretentiously.Read it aloud to another person and ask him or her where it has taken them, aesthetically, emotionally, and spiritually.Pairing odd combinations of images -- many of them not even fresh or original -- is not poetry, but gamesmanship, verbal solitaire.Poetry is not about scratching your head, but feeding it.Try reading some real lyric and narrative poetry: Merwin, Strand, Hecht, Simic, Rich, Justice, Ai, Christopher, Hirsch, Spires, Levine -- there's a world of fabulous American poetry out there, rich with texture, music, and yes, meaning. ... Read more

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First book of selected poems by this core member of the Language writing group. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

A ranging collection of powerful poems
Rae Armantrout has a secure foothold among academic readers, but her appeal seems not to have crossed to those of us in the wider population. I suspect this is not because of the so-called "difficulty" of her poems: Emily Dickinson is just as difficult and no less popular for it. Instead, I blame how folks write about her work.

Here is an excerpt from the poet Ron Silliman's foreward to Veil: "These poems return obsessively to this Wittgensteinian double bind: The objects and events of this world can never be experienced directly, absent all mediation." Now, this may be a perfectly astute description of Armantrout's style, but it doesn't exactly give me the confidence to believe that I can understand anything going on in this book. But I can! I can understand it, or some of it.

Look, you should read Armantrout--at least this selection of her poems. She'll show you something different than what she shows me; to be sure, she'll show us all something different, but you'll certainly see something (and probably not that Wittgensteinian bind that binds). She tinkers with cliché and psychology, and enjoys disrupting the way we think about meaning.

Here's her own explanation of what she does, taken (I hope permissibly) from the first stanze of her arresting "My Problem" (in Made To Seem (New American Poetry) and selected for Veil):

It is my responsibility
to squeeze
the present from the past
by demanding particulars.

When the dog is used
to represent the inner
man, I need to ask,
"What kind of dog is it?"

modern verse that must last
Raw Armantrout is a very exciting poet.In her poems she is constantly communicating such incredibly unique & gleaming thoughts.Her minimalistic style is so unlike anything else I've read. ... Read more

Product Description
In her latest collection, Rae Armantrout considers the shaping effects of language in the context of new and frightening global realities. Attempting to imagine the unimaginable and see the unseen, Armantrout evokes a "next life" beyond the current, and too often degraded, one. From the new physics to mortality, Armantrout engages with the half-seen and the half-believed. These poems step into the dance of consciousness and its perennial ghost partner--"to make the world up/of provisional pairs." At a time when our world is being progressively despoiled, Armantrout has emerged as one of our most important and articulate authors. These poems push against the limit of knowledge, that event-horizon, and into the echoes and phantasms beyond, calling us to look toward the "next life" and find it where we can. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Rae Armantrout, succinct mistress of line
Rae Armantrout is a poet of intensely private language whose seeming fragments of sentences, scenes and interior recollections still read vividly, provocatively.A member of the Language group of poets whose other members include Ron Silliman, Bob Perleman and Lynn Hejinian among other notables, she has distinguished herself from the frequently discursive style that interrogates the boundries between the nominal power of language and the contradictions that result when conventional meaning rubs against insoluable fact, Armantrout's poetry is brief, terser, more taciturn and pared to the essential terms and the sensations they conflate. More autobiographical, perhaps, more concerned with raising a sense of genuine autonomy from the words one employs to define direction and purpose, Armantrout's poetry is an on going inquiry about what lies beyond our expectations once they've been given the lie. As in this fine collection's title,what is the "Next Life"? What she leaves out is fully formed by its absence.

We wake up to an empty room
addressing itself in scare quotes.

"Happen" and "now"
have been smuggled out,

to arrive safely in the past tense.

We come home to a cat
made entirely of fish.
--"Reversible"

Where a good many poets lavish their subjects with an overflow of language that twists and turns and deliberately problematizes syntax to achieve effects that are more stunts than perception or even an interrogation of an elusive notion, Armantrout's poetry is strong, stoic, lean to the degree that what remains are the resonances of a personality witnessing the truth when internal idealism and material fact don't compliment each other. Armantrout's poetry is a cool voice intoning over the varied scraps and arcana of experience, and crisply discovers, underlines and
speaks with a curt irony. There are things we've said we were, there are the things we've become, and there are the words we first used to make our declarations asserted again, though mutated, altered, given a few shades of new meaning to meet the demands of a life that becomes more complicated with small, distracting matters. There's a blunted, occasionally jagged feeling to Armantrout's lines, a cadence that will alternate between the hard, acute image, the half-uttered phrases that seem like mumbles, and the juxtapositions of word and deed
that expose a archeology of deferred emotion.

Next
In the poems of NEXT LIFE, the natural world is taking a beating, not only from the rival attractions of the cinema and TV, but from the haste with which we have catapulted earth's slide into eco-catastrophe.From the very first poem, "Tease," to the last, we see the natural order made to feel second-rate, flowers turn into wallflowers.In "Tease," bare trees must be supplemented by their imagined resemblance to human skeletons to earn a place in the "provisional parts" of the world, while the poem works up a keen interest in a serial killer rapist movie--the eternal pair of cop versus serial killer.By the second poem, "Line," the speaker can no longer recall the origins of the term "rooting around."

Armantrout asserts that "Narrative prepares me/ to see/ whatever I see next," for one is always anticipating oneself, like the fellow Nicolas Cage plays in the new film NEXT--he can see everything two minutes into the future, thus it's hard to surprise him.In his case precognition itself foregrounds narrative's numinousness, to "produce a continuous present," as the poet reminds us in "As (2)."Three birds show up to stage a "framing gesture,/ / an inclusive sweep."

I have admired her writing for nearly 25 years, and last week I went to see her read from some of the poems in NEXT LIFE as she spoke on a bookstore panel here in San Francisco on "The Future of Poetry."It was the perfect topic for the theorist of NEXT LIFE, in which poetry's next two minutes seem always only as far away as the reach of one's hand.And she has a beautiful speaking voice too, her vowels pleasantly striated.If only I could have that voice of the operator eliminated from my phone system and have Rae Armantrout tell me that when I hear the tone, the time will be 10:49 a.m. and fifty seconds.

In the meantime her new book gives us flashes of another world, the chazzerai of this one, and I find it telling that so much of it comes from an attempted rehabilitation of the flora and fauna that, dried and etiolated, we are losing every day."Dry, white frazzle/ in a blue vase" (cf Marlon Brando in A DRY WHITE SEASON) "beautiful--/ / a frozen swarm/ of incommensurate wishes." ["Close."] ... Read more

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The poems in Money Shot are forensic. Just as the money shot in porn is proof of the male orgasm, these poems explore questions of revelation and concealment. What is seen, what is hidden, and how do we know? Money Shot's investigation of these questions takes on a particular urgency because it occurs in the context of the suddenly revealed market manipulation and subsequent "great recession" of 2008-2009. In these poems, Rae Armantrout searches for new ways to organize information. What can be made manifest? What constitutes proof? Do we "know it when we see it"? Looking at sex, botany, cosmology, and death through the dark lens of "disaster capitalism," Armantrout finds evidence of betrayal, grounds for rebellion, moments of possibility, and even pleasure, in a time of sudden scarcity and relentless greed.

This stunning follow-up to Versed--winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a finalist for the National Book Award--is a wonderfully stringent exploration of how deeply our experience of everyday life is embedded in capitalism. ... Read more

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Rae Armantrout's most recent collection of poems focuses on the phenomenon of time, both as lived experience at the start of the 21st century and as a stubborn mystery confronting physicists and philosophers. The poems in this book are polyphonic: they juxtapose the discourses of science and religion, Hollywood and the occasional psychotic stranger. The title poem, which appears in Best American Poetry 2002, leads off with a "sphinx" asking "Does a road / run its whole length / at once? / Does a creature / curve to meet / itself?" Armantrout's work, with its careful syntax bordering on plain speech and meticulously scored short lines, is always struggling with the problem of consciousness, its blindspots and double-binds. The poems whirl like shifting and scattered pieces of the present moment. They attempt to "make sense" of our lives while acknowledging the depth of our self-deception and deception. ... Read more

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Multifaceted examinations and appreciations of RaeArmantrout's innovative and influential poetry.

Featuring essays by: Lyn Hejinian, Laura Moriarty, Aldon L. Nielsen,Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Brenda Hillman, Fanny Howe, Ann Vickery, SusanWheeler, Lydia Davis, Jessica Grim, Kit Robinson, Robert Creeley,Bobbie West, Tom Beckett, David Bromige, Charles Alexander, HankLazer, Bob Perelman, and Ron Silliman ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

The pleasures of language
Wow!Mr. Silliman seems to be in the company of Ashbery and Clark Coolidge when it comes to making higher sense out of apparent nonsense.And 900 pages' worth--God's plenty!I am also amazed as to who published this--a university better known for Bear Bryant.

Very highly recommended for anyone who doesn't feel that poetry (or in this case, prose poetry) has to "make sense." ... Read more

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Literary Nonfiction. Biography and Memoir. Part Nine in the ongoing series of collective autobiography, THE GRAND PIANO: PART 9 continues to mark the events, movements and intersections among ten contributing 1970s Language poets. "Like the early avant-gardes, the poets who gathered at THE GRAND PIANO developed not only an exacting and liberating poetics, but also a way of living-in-art. Its chronicle here is many things, among them a deeply human and amusing map to building community through literature in this most unlikely of times"--Cole Swensen. ... Read more

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Poetry. "Hard edge.... [She] uses words with laser precision to explore facets which a lesser intelligence would never notice. Her sense of the essential is unfailing"--Ron Silliman. "A.'s phrasing and sculptured concision give her poems an exceptional formal coherence. Her ear shapes solid landscapes.... More typically she prefers an elusive humor, layered with parody and occasionally populated by cartoon characters in various stages of panic. The offhandedness of her manner is belied by the complex emotional charge she gets from apparently banal materials"--Geoffrey O'Brien, Voice Literary Supplement. "Armantrout's poems ride the fence of the Language School movement. PRECEDENCE features poems of wit and humor not typical of the movement"--John Stickney, The Columbus Dispatch. ... Read more

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Poetry. The poems in TRUE are Rae Armantrout's contribution to the Atelos project, a series begun in 1995 and devoted to publishing, under the sign of poetry, writing which challenges the conventional definitions of poetry, since such definitions have tended to isolate it from intellectual life, arrest its development, and curtail its impact. The text here appears in prose paragraphs and details much of the poet's own history. A founding L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet, her poems have appeared in journals such as The Iowa Review, in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, and in books, including PRECEDENCE and MADE TO SEEM. She teaches writing at the University of California, San Diego. ... Read more

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Cultural Writing. Literary Criticism. Essays. These wide-ranging talks, essays, and interviews-beginning with "Why Don't Women Do Language-Oriented Writing?" and including "Feminist Poetics and the Meaning of Clarity," "Poetic Silence," and "Cosmology and Me"--are essential documents for understanding not only Rae Armantrout's poetry and poetics but her contribution to the development of language poetry in particular and contemporary poetry in general. Like her poetry, Armantrout's prose is marked by concision, a refreshing absence of jargon, and a quizzical mind that never rests easy. COLLECTED PROSE also features True, Armantrout's illuminating autobiography, which details her early years in San Diego and Berkeley. ... Read more

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Word count: 1377. ... Read more

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Chapters: Michael Palmer, Ron Silliman, Susan Howe, Nick Piombino, Charles Bernstein, Barrett Watten, Rae Armantrout, Hannah Weiner, Michael Davidson, Robert Grenier, Larry Eigner, Fanny Howe, Leslie Scalapino, Bob Perelman, Harryette Mullen, Lyn Hejinian, Clark Coolidge, Bruce Andrews, Alan Davies, Ray Dipalma, Leland Hickman, Steve Benson, Bernadette Mayer, Carla Harryman, Tina Darragh, Tom Mandel, Kit Robinson, Ted Pearson, Steve Mccaffery, Alan Bernheimer, P. Inman, Annex Press, David Melnick, L=a=n=g=u=a=g=e, This. Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 141. Not illustrated. Free updates online. Purchase includes a free trial membership in the publisher's book club where you can select from more than a million books without charge. Excerpt: Michael Palmer (born May 11, 1943; Manhattan, New York) is a contemporary American poet and translator. He attended Harvard University where he earned a BA in French and a MA in Comparative Literature. He has worked extensively with Contemporary dance for over thirty years and has collaborated with many composers and visual artists. Palmer has lived in San Francisco since 1969. Palmer is the 2006 recipient of the Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. This $100,000 (US) prize recognizes outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Michael Palmer began actively publishing poetry in the 1960s. Two events in the early sixties would prove particularly decisive for his development as a poet. First, he attended the now famous Vancouver Poetry Conference in 1963. This July-August 1963 Poetry Conference in Vancouver, British Columbia spanned three weeks and involved about sixty people who had registered for a program of discussions, workshops, lectures, and readings designed by Warren Tallman and Robert Creeley as a summer course at the University of B.C. There Palmer met writers and artists who would leave an indelible mark on his own developing sense of a poetics, especially ...More: http://booksllc.net/?id=849066 ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Rae Armantrout (born 13 April 1947) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet generally associated with the Language Poets. Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California but grew up in San Diego. She has published nine books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies. Armantrout currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego, where she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics. On March 11, 2010, she was awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for her book of poetry entitled Versed published by the Wesleyan University Press, which had also been nominated for the National Book Award. The book later earned her the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Wesleyan will publish Rae Armantrout's next collection, Money Shot, in June of 2011. She is the recipient of numerous other awards for her poetry, including most recently an award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008. ... Read more