What do you think?
Rate this book
Up to Speed
Corrosive new poems from a poet whose work challenges expectations.
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 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.
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 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.
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
First published February 3, 2004
79 people want to read
About the author
Rae Armantrout
75 books108 followersRae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with the Language poets. Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California but grew up in San Diego. She has published ten 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, Armantrout was awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for her book of poetry Versed published by the Wesleyan University Press, which had also been nominated for the National Book Award. The book later earned the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Armantrout’s most recent collection, Money Shot, was published in February 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.
On March 11, 2010, Armantrout was awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for her book of poetry Versed published by the Wesleyan University Press, which had also been nominated for the National Book Award. The book later earned the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Armantrout’s most recent collection, Money Shot, was published in February 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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
July 30, 2022
“What are words for?
To be put in order,
time disentangle from space.
So when I get there,
there’s no one around —
just a phrase
somewhere,
hearing itself
think,
whistling up and down
its forecast
of a scale
while twigs make
minor adjustments.” - “Phrasing”
To be put in order,
time disentangle from space.
So when I get there,
there’s no one around —
just a phrase
somewhere,
hearing itself
think,
whistling up and down
its forecast
of a scale
while twigs make
minor adjustments.” - “Phrasing”
Read
February 27, 2008Rae Armantrout’s Up To Speed, is an accomplished sequence of poems that challenge and provoke the experience of reading. In as far as the term “experience” is concerned, its etymology points to: “a trial; observation of facts; condition or event by which one is affected; state of having been occupied in some way.” Within this context, there is way to enter Armantrout’s poems, a space where the attention to language is heightened, and is on heightened alert to its material basis. In other words, to the fact of language as a mediator of experience and understanding, as well as a bearing of signification, which Armantrout is given to question through form and what I might call a co-optation of the vocabulary of our media saturated lives.
While Armantrout has often eschewed or has been uncomfortable with the title as a language poet, she is correct to write that “to believe non-referentiality is possible is to believe language can be divorced from thought, words from their histories.” While context is often problematized and any kind of narrative thread abandoned, she is more than privy to the historical and social qualities of the language we are given to use, and language’s rhetorical quality—to communicate and/or to persuade. The whole issue of referentiality in an Armantrout poem is complicated by the often abstract titles of her poems and their serial nature. While some titles admittedly fail to frame the poem for me in an easily tangible manner, they on the contrary, invite a careful and considerate reading that allows me to dwell in a state of bewilderment, which I imagine is a state Armantrout is not unfamiliar with given her affiliations with Fanny Howe. This bewilderment I speak of has to do with tracing the shifts and movements of the poems in Up To Speed, and indeed, in much of her work. That is to say, any questions that may arise for me during the course of reading a particular poem, are frequently, or perhaps never answered in any definitive way.
Armantrout imagines that the indeterminate can be occupied with an open-endedness, both in form of a poem and in the speech act. I am very much as home in this territory and for all of Armantrout’s skilled craftsmanship, she manages to make sense in way that appears somewhat paradoxical. If her poems can be thought of as clusters of words strung together from the disparate resources of our common language, such as the usage of found language, and overheard conversations, etc, she finds a way to test the mental activity of thinking, of making associations. I am at pains to try and quote from her work to satisfy my conjectures and critical investigation of her work. It may be that her poems are unquotable, and in that, best read as singular moments of thought and experience. As Armantrout herself has said of the associations between the numbered sections and asterisks of her poems, they are “neither transparent and direct nor arbitrary, but somewhere in between…Doubt and choice can coexist in the reader’s mind. For me this better corresponds to the character of experience.”
It would detract from the poems in Up To Speed by thinking of them as a form of mimicry to the way facts and information gets filtered by the human mind, by the way voices are heard in a variety of social and private spaces. In the prose poem, “Imaginary Places,” the speaker says, “To see words pulled one by one into existence is to intrude on a privacy of sorts. But we are familiar with the contract between spectator and performer.” Here, the speaker asserts how the act of writing is rhetorical, that is, how words perform meaning upon us as receivers of language. However, as much as Armantrout attempts to perform meaning upon the reader, she presents us with the desire for suspicion, and with a tendency towards anxiety as has been noted by Ron Silliman. Thus, if we as readers expect to find resolution within these poems, we are looking in the wrong place. While the poems don’t so much hold or enact opinions about American culture, they are attentive to the possibility of configuring meaning out of society’s material and emotional detritus. For her, questioning and partaking in the language of cultural institutions such as science and philosophy is a way to engage and perhaps carry out a strange critique of our lives.
While Armantrout has often eschewed or has been uncomfortable with the title as a language poet, she is correct to write that “to believe non-referentiality is possible is to believe language can be divorced from thought, words from their histories.” While context is often problematized and any kind of narrative thread abandoned, she is more than privy to the historical and social qualities of the language we are given to use, and language’s rhetorical quality—to communicate and/or to persuade. The whole issue of referentiality in an Armantrout poem is complicated by the often abstract titles of her poems and their serial nature. While some titles admittedly fail to frame the poem for me in an easily tangible manner, they on the contrary, invite a careful and considerate reading that allows me to dwell in a state of bewilderment, which I imagine is a state Armantrout is not unfamiliar with given her affiliations with Fanny Howe. This bewilderment I speak of has to do with tracing the shifts and movements of the poems in Up To Speed, and indeed, in much of her work. That is to say, any questions that may arise for me during the course of reading a particular poem, are frequently, or perhaps never answered in any definitive way.
Armantrout imagines that the indeterminate can be occupied with an open-endedness, both in form of a poem and in the speech act. I am very much as home in this territory and for all of Armantrout’s skilled craftsmanship, she manages to make sense in way that appears somewhat paradoxical. If her poems can be thought of as clusters of words strung together from the disparate resources of our common language, such as the usage of found language, and overheard conversations, etc, she finds a way to test the mental activity of thinking, of making associations. I am at pains to try and quote from her work to satisfy my conjectures and critical investigation of her work. It may be that her poems are unquotable, and in that, best read as singular moments of thought and experience. As Armantrout herself has said of the associations between the numbered sections and asterisks of her poems, they are “neither transparent and direct nor arbitrary, but somewhere in between…Doubt and choice can coexist in the reader’s mind. For me this better corresponds to the character of experience.”
It would detract from the poems in Up To Speed by thinking of them as a form of mimicry to the way facts and information gets filtered by the human mind, by the way voices are heard in a variety of social and private spaces. In the prose poem, “Imaginary Places,” the speaker says, “To see words pulled one by one into existence is to intrude on a privacy of sorts. But we are familiar with the contract between spectator and performer.” Here, the speaker asserts how the act of writing is rhetorical, that is, how words perform meaning upon us as receivers of language. However, as much as Armantrout attempts to perform meaning upon the reader, she presents us with the desire for suspicion, and with a tendency towards anxiety as has been noted by Ron Silliman. Thus, if we as readers expect to find resolution within these poems, we are looking in the wrong place. While the poems don’t so much hold or enact opinions about American culture, they are attentive to the possibility of configuring meaning out of society’s material and emotional detritus. For her, questioning and partaking in the language of cultural institutions such as science and philosophy is a way to engage and perhaps carry out a strange critique of our lives.
September 27, 2014
This is the second time I've read this collection, the first being in grad school five years back. It contains some moments of beauty scattered among the poems. From "The Fit:" "In a coming-of-age story/each dream/produces me://an ignorance/on the point of revelation." Similarly in "Write Home," she pens "In order to write/you must fall in love//with your own thought/every time." I enjoy these rare moments and wish entire poems communicated as well to me. Like in the cited examples, her words about words and writing ring very true and clear. "'When size really counts,'/the billboard says//showing the product/tiny,//in one corner,//so we need to search for it./Come find me.//I stand/behind these words." [from "Almost"].
Overall I found the poems too vague. Pages would go by without an image that spoke to me. An early poem, "Afterlife," colored my reading: "He always said my poems were lonely, as if each thing (word, person) stood still, waiting for meaning." I wish I hadn't found this an accurate description of the entire collection for me.
I must call out two geek moments for me that I loved: [From "Next Generations"] "But, on 'Star Trek,' we aren't the Borg,/the aggressive conglomerate,/each member part humanoid, part/machine, bent on assimilating/foreign cultures. In fact,/we destroy their ship,/night after night,/in preparation for sleep." [and from the prose-poem "As One"] "After months apart, my friend invites me to meet her at a tourist spot in the town where we both used to live. We sit at a table in the sun, behind a mariachi band, and speak rapidly, as if trying to 'catch up.' She says that what scientists are learning about time suggests it may be possible to see into the future. I agree by mangling quotes from Godel and Hawking. 'If the entire universe is spinning--and why not?--time may be circular.' We interrupt each other frequently, as if excited, though, in fact, we have had this conversation several times before."
Overall I found the poems too vague. Pages would go by without an image that spoke to me. An early poem, "Afterlife," colored my reading: "He always said my poems were lonely, as if each thing (word, person) stood still, waiting for meaning." I wish I hadn't found this an accurate description of the entire collection for me.
I must call out two geek moments for me that I loved: [From "Next Generations"] "But, on 'Star Trek,' we aren't the Borg,/the aggressive conglomerate,/each member part humanoid, part/machine, bent on assimilating/foreign cultures. In fact,/we destroy their ship,/night after night,/in preparation for sleep." [and from the prose-poem "As One"] "After months apart, my friend invites me to meet her at a tourist spot in the town where we both used to live. We sit at a table in the sun, behind a mariachi band, and speak rapidly, as if trying to 'catch up.' She says that what scientists are learning about time suggests it may be possible to see into the future. I agree by mangling quotes from Godel and Hawking. 'If the entire universe is spinning--and why not?--time may be circular.' We interrupt each other frequently, as if excited, though, in fact, we have had this conversation several times before."
September 24, 2008
Each of Armantrout's poems have light stanzas, which may be easy to read, but can be a little vague at times. However, they somehow belong together, flow together, and become something awkward, but recognizable and witty. Many mention dreams and the lines have the same feeling of a dream, blurring reality and connectedness.
She likes to play with words (e.g. "The 'ness'/that is nothingness", and "I think you're being escorted/between 'woe'/and 'woven'").
I enjoyed it and may read it again.
I have many, many quotations (which says something in itself):
"A child's cry breaks/into spires/and alcoves;//glass/is stained." - Sake
"Or when we were in bed, he throwing me into a new position/every few seconds as if frantically searching for nothing." - Afterlife: 2 (I would love to see this turned into a full poem)
"He always says my poems were lonely, as if each thing (word, per-/son) stood still, waiting for meaning." - Afterlife: 2
"In the shorter version,//tentacled/stomach swallows stomach." - Entanglement
"Can a dreamer/outwit her dream?//Not on a first date." - My Advantage
"Anyone/not seconded//burns up in rage." - Seconds: 3
"If sadness/is akin to patience, we're back!" - Upperworld
"It's the way the eight legs/can neither line up nor/come abreast,//each entering the present/in its own good time,//that spooks us." - Many
"The opposite/of nothingness//is direction." - Once
"In order to write/you must fall in love//with your own thought/every time." - Write Home
She likes to play with words (e.g. "The 'ness'/that is nothingness", and "I think you're being escorted/between 'woe'/and 'woven'").
I enjoyed it and may read it again.
I have many, many quotations (which says something in itself):
"A child's cry breaks/into spires/and alcoves;//glass/is stained." - Sake
"Or when we were in bed, he throwing me into a new position/every few seconds as if frantically searching for nothing." - Afterlife: 2 (I would love to see this turned into a full poem)
"He always says my poems were lonely, as if each thing (word, per-/son) stood still, waiting for meaning." - Afterlife: 2
"In the shorter version,//tentacled/stomach swallows stomach." - Entanglement
"Can a dreamer/outwit her dream?//Not on a first date." - My Advantage
"Anyone/not seconded//burns up in rage." - Seconds: 3
"If sadness/is akin to patience, we're back!" - Upperworld
"It's the way the eight legs/can neither line up nor/come abreast,//each entering the present/in its own good time,//that spooks us." - Many
"The opposite/of nothingness//is direction." - Once
"In order to write/you must fall in love//with your own thought/every time." - Write Home
December 17, 2010
I've read experimental poetry so detatched from meaning it felt like the writer's private game. Armantrout's poems are not like that. She gives me just enough to sort of build a mental and emotional framework and then bends the rules of meaning, of expectation, of continuity to make me feel like I'm in a dream not quite happening in this dimension. I love this feeling.
August 15, 2018
Meh.
He always said my poems were lonely, as if each thing (word, person) stood still, waiting for meaning.
- "Afterlife"
He always said my poems were lonely, as if each thing (word, person) stood still, waiting for meaning.
- "Afterlife"
August 6, 2016
I loved this collection. Poetry can be a cherry-picking reading hobby, but Armantrout’s voice in Up to Speed is so consistent and sure that even the most far-flung scribble would feel essential to the compilation. The poems are sometimes dreamy and directionless, but each word is barbed with insight. She spreads words like bridge planks over a philosophical abyss, using only as many as necessary, teasing us with glimpses of both the nothingness and infinity traversed by language.
Armountrout’s style is fresh and effectively surreal. She is a master of economy, conjuring nuanced emotion and observational depth with very few words. Instead of more traditional commas and periods, she relies on the quotation mark and the parentheses to create layers, rather than barriers or suggestions of pace. Taken with the ambiguity and the sparseness of the language, the precision and beauty of her poetry is mysteriously hard to account for, as if she were sewing intricate lace with a broken loom.
Her strengths allow her to really shine in a single line when she wants to. It feels wrong to use these scraps out of context but a few of my favorites are:
"a thought is a wish for relation doubling as a boundary,"
"the opposite of nothingness is direction,"
"in order to write you must fall in love with your own thought every time."
Armantrout sets her sights on the basics, but she draws from a palette that is more philosophical than poetic: time, space, movement, relations between concepts, self-consciousness. She explores these subjects with such quiet confidence and wit that they somehow seem more illuminated in her compact poems than in any ancient Greek text.
Relationships between things are treated with a playful and ingenious discernment, and gracefully recorded. At her very best, Armantrout proves that a crisp metaphor and a handful of very exact sentences is more effective than pages of erudition or a well-crafted essay.
"light finds the quickest route
and the mind tries to see patterns.
what do these things have in common?
they behave as if impatient."
Like a magician she summons up images with a flick of the wrist, and saws our beautiful trusted things in half, smiling, showing us that all is an illusion.
"i don't mind
learning
i'm in hell
if
i can learn it
again and again."
Armountrout’s style is fresh and effectively surreal. She is a master of economy, conjuring nuanced emotion and observational depth with very few words. Instead of more traditional commas and periods, she relies on the quotation mark and the parentheses to create layers, rather than barriers or suggestions of pace. Taken with the ambiguity and the sparseness of the language, the precision and beauty of her poetry is mysteriously hard to account for, as if she were sewing intricate lace with a broken loom.
Her strengths allow her to really shine in a single line when she wants to. It feels wrong to use these scraps out of context but a few of my favorites are:
"a thought is a wish for relation doubling as a boundary,"
"the opposite of nothingness is direction,"
"in order to write you must fall in love with your own thought every time."
Armantrout sets her sights on the basics, but she draws from a palette that is more philosophical than poetic: time, space, movement, relations between concepts, self-consciousness. She explores these subjects with such quiet confidence and wit that they somehow seem more illuminated in her compact poems than in any ancient Greek text.
Relationships between things are treated with a playful and ingenious discernment, and gracefully recorded. At her very best, Armantrout proves that a crisp metaphor and a handful of very exact sentences is more effective than pages of erudition or a well-crafted essay.
"light finds the quickest route
and the mind tries to see patterns.
what do these things have in common?
they behave as if impatient."
Like a magician she summons up images with a flick of the wrist, and saws our beautiful trusted things in half, smiling, showing us that all is an illusion.
"i don't mind
learning
i'm in hell
if
i can learn it
again and again."
July 5, 2009
Armantrout continues to be America's premier poet philosopher, but I don't think this book is her best. Her stanza's could stand alone as single poems. Fit together, they can sometimes be vague and confusing. I occasionally thought she went on too damn long. I love her, though, for her dead-on commentary. No one knows our culture better. Just see what she has to say about fashion ("Yet"), the Borg ("Next Generations"), and TV news ("Once").
August 4, 2010
For poetry class. I’m not a huge Armentrout fan.
November 24, 2010
poems speak of consciouness, it blind spots, and double-binds
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews