Versed

by Rae Armantrout

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2010)
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award (2009)

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. A reader's companion is available at http: //versedreader.site.wesleyan.edu/

Genres: Poetry, 21st Century, American, School, Womens, The United States Of America, Fiction

136 pages, Hardcover

First published January 30, 2009

About the author

Rae 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.

Reviews

[Bill Kerwin · Rating 4 out of 5]

It won the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle, and was a finalist for the National Book, but I have to admit that I am not the ideal audience for Versed. It is what they call “language poetry”, and I have never been much of a fan. Still, of the little “language” poetry I have encountered, Armantrout is among the best.

“Language” poetry—emerging in the ‘70’s—set itself in opposition to the fashionable confessional poetry of the day (Lowell, Berryman, Plath, Sexton)--great stuff that later degenerated into the typical “workshop” poem—by de-emphasizing the emotional utterance of the writer and emphasizing the intellectual act of the reader, presenting him with a fragmentary (often metonymic) language artifacts and inviting the reader’s interpretation. It downplays the personal and the lyric in favor of the analytic and the precise; often, it begins to question the permanency--the very existence—of the human personality, of time itself. At worst, poetry like this is a dry collection of philosophical loops; at best, it is something austere and Olympian, like Zukovsky's Z or the more abstract lyrics of W.C. Williams.

Rae Armantrout is a seriously playful poet, intent on exploring the nature of language and the speaker of language, their relation to each other and the external world. I find many of her poems baffling, but at best they are gnomic and illuminating, like a sentence of Wittgenstein’s or a Zen koan.

In this book, her exploration is heightened in its intensity and significance because she has been diagnosed with cancer, and the nature of the cell that creates and uncreates also becomes an object of meditation. Her cancer makes the poem more of a narrative, providing added interest for old school confessional poetry fans like me.

The following are two poems taken from “Dark Matter,” the second and last section of the book, the one that deals elliptically with Armantrout’s cancer:

AROUND

Time is pleased
to draw itself
out
permit itself
pendulous loops,

to allow them
meaning,

this meaning,
as it goes

along

*

Chuck and I are pleased
to have found a spot
where my ashes can be scattered.
It looks like a construction site
now
but it’s adjacent
to a breathtaking, rocky coast.
Chuck sees places
where he might snorkel.
We’re being shown through
by a sort of realtor.
We’re interested but can’t get her
to fix the price.

*

“The future
is all around us”

It’s a place,

anyplace
where we don’t exist.




PASS


Single cells

become like-minded,

forming a consensus

or quorum

Bioluminescence and virulence

are two ways

we describe the feeling

they share then.

With effort,

humans can approach

this condition.

“Synchronized swimming

has afforded me

a wonderful life,”

says one informant.

Why not?

I too would like

to exert power

over time,

to pass it,

aggressively, dramatically,

and forget all about it

until even

the meaning of the word

“pass”

gets lost

in a rosy glow.

[Jack Granath · Rating 2 out of 5]

I don't despise it, but it does make me hate poetry. Everyone around me hates poetry, and I'm always defending it. Then this comes along, winning both Pulitzer and NBCC Award, and I want to go have a beer with dockworkers (I don't know any dockworkers) and talk about sports.

I would describe it as minimalist non sequitur--fragments of everyday speech, keywords from critical theory and contemporary science, pop culture winks, ordinary (as if overheard) phrases in quotation marks, and some spillage of private, unreachable stuff from the author's personal life, all of it presented in little bundles that look deceptively (enticingly) Asian from a distance, three bundles or so to a poem. The author is obviously intelligent, and the book jacket mentions her "signature wit," though I think we may have to take that in a special, academic sense that has nothing to do with funny.

Somewhere along the way poetry became a mode of communication in which the desire to communicate, found to be embarrassing, was eradicated. If Modernism was that explosion, this is its long-settled dust. I'm actually depressed tonight picturing a poetry establishment that looks up long enough from grading papers to acclaim this book so unanimously and throw big prizes at it. I feel like a Martian. A dockworker Martian with a six pack and a big telescope.

---

[Next day.:] Feeling better, thanks. I recommend "Previews" on p. 88.

[Robert Beveridge · Rating 2 out of 5]

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

[Gijs Koorevaar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This has been my first foray into Language poetry (and contemporary American poetry in general, really) and from what I've read Armantrout differs from most Language poets, in that she combines a more confessional mode with the traditional high concept Language poetry. Some of these poems are clearly autobiographical, dealing with Rae Armantrout's fight with cancer and the particular experiences of medical examinations and hospital stays. Most of this collection on the other hand is dense, abstract and 'autonomous'; it's poetry that explores the way metaphor and meaning works, ways of representing time in language, and how language preserves and obscures experience:

'Metaphor forms
a crust
beneath which
the crevasse
of each experience.'

Formally it is characterized, with some exceptions by ellipsis. The short lines heavily emphasize the syntax. I think this is poetry that really requires your full attention on a granular level. I did not give it the attention I believe it's due at every point in my reading, except for a few poems that immediately grabbed my attention. I have a preference for the poems (or fragments) that are explicitly about poetry itself:

'Poems adressed
to their own dead letters --
campy femme-fatales.

Poems adressed
to their end-times'
desiccation.

Entropy increases as I recall
less and less
of the number string.

Snackle-crackle
of strings breaking --
that radiation hiss evening things out.'

This fragment is fantastic, the way this poem traces it's own dissolution. Plus snackle-crackle is a very fun onomatopee.

I would recommend this collection if you're a nerd. I am, and I will have to reread this with some more experience with adjacent poetry under my belt.

[Kirsten Kinnell · Rating 2 out of 5]

This collection really frustrated me. I felt like I'd been invited to a friend's house expecting to come in, take off my shoes and have some tea. Instead I was left out on the front porch knocking. Every now and again it seemed like the door opened a crack only to shut again the next moment. I'm reasonably intelligent and well-read and even with some effort I couldn't make heads nor tails out of most of these poems.

Knowing that Armantrout is a "language poet" doesn't help much, it only makes me feel silly trying to make sense out of her work. I think this is why so many of my friends despise poetry-- this kind of thing makes it seem like an inside game with rules you'll never learn.

[Grete · Rating 2 out of 5]

Winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; also a finalist for the National Book Award.

Poetry, more than any other class of writing, is a matter of taste. I found this volume largely unapproachable - often far too disjointed and cryptic to yield emotional resonances or even intellectual connection-making. Yet Armantrout punches out her elliptical lines in jaunty, energetic vocabulary which I found invigorating. The bits of prose poetry fell flat, lacking the compression and evocativeness that are the only qualities which can make that strangest of genres sing.

[Ted Burke · Rating 5 out of 5]

The idea that Rae Armantrout's work is difficult is, as has been remarked about "Ulysses", is made too much of. There are items, phrases, condensed cadences and references that need to be parsed, examined, considered thoughtfully , but as with Joyce's musicality , wit and sensuality, there is a tangible presence in Rae's work with which a reader can frame their own response. It's an old distinction that one notices in the best voices--the emphasis is more on creating a sense of things rather than making sense, "making sense", in this case, being that the one wants to define and contain experience as if it were a commodity. What Rae achieves (and what Stephen Burt spoke to in his New York Times review of "Versed") is that the facts of our lives, the joy, the agony, the aches and illnesses, are too slippery in their larger implications to place within convenient brackets. She understands what happens when a recollected event and a later idea merge in the stream of the alert psyche.

Her method, perhaps, is the reverse of that of Ashbery or Ammons,two poets who have, with frequent inspiration, written at length to suggest the collisions of subjective responses to the material plain. Rae Armantrout gets the exact moment when a history of impressions meet each other on the long highway. She places the reader in the moment, amid the particulars her poems highlight. The reader finds something of their story in her rigorously pared-back sharing. The readers get it, and it would be nice if her being awarded a Pulitzer indicates that larger media are done ghettoizing poets. In the meantime, it's a good thing that she has the award. A very good thing.

[Holly Raymond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Armantrout, like fellow early-langpo poet Lyn Hejinian, has kind of mellowed out with age and become less formally experimental. However, while Hejinian has gotten pretty cozy in her narrative cul-de-sac, Armantrout is still working with poetry as, most importantly, a field of linguistic play. She's really found a nice balance. Obviously, to garner a Pulitzer, she's writing stuff with very popular appeal, but it's still inventive and daring. I like her more recent book, 'Money Shots,' a bit more, but 'Versed' is pretty remarkable in actually succeeding in pleasing everyone all the time.

[Peter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Definitely not something I can just pick up and read. This book demands attention and consideration and willingness. Not all of the poems coalesced into something comprehensible or even experiential, but some did, maybe about half. When it became clear that both time and language were recurring topics the collection started "working" better for me. My favorite bit was a line about about going from "stipulation" back to plain old "stipple." I had to chuckle at that. That's the silly kind of word play I do in my own head sometimes to amuse myself, and here Armantrout is trying to do something more with it. It was a good reminder to me that play with words is important to crafting with words.

[emma · Rating 2 out of 5]

wasn't really feeling this one.

fave poem: the racket

fave line: "As if you could escape / by following / the path you carved / there / to its prescribed end" (from inscription)

[Keith Taylor · Rating 5 out of 5]

It took quite a while for Armantrout's poetry to open up for me, but this book was my way in. After this, her poetry has all been a pleasure for me. One of the reasons we keep at it! Here's thing I wrote a while back:

For anyone who reads poetry, there are always poets who become important only after one learns how to read them. Rae Armantrout is one of those for me. When I started reading her almost thirty years ago, I associated her with a difficult group of poets who were challenging the conventions of narrative and image that then dominated American poetry. They called themselves Language Poets, and focused their work on the most basic elements of poetry, wordplay and sound, often loudly eschewing anything that might be called “meaning” and defying anything that would value one individual’s “story” over another’s. It was difficult to read this work. I read it, but without much enjoyment.

Sometime around Armantrout’s third book, Necromance, I started hearing something different in her work. Individual lines or groups of them began to sound like epigrams, bits of wisdom arising from a philosophical exploration of the world: “Beauty appeals/like a cry/for help . . .” I started hearing poems that might have been written by a latter-day Emily Dickinson, poems wherein the self was hidden, yet obviously there, trying in a rigorous way to understand its place in the world.

By the time she published Versed in 2009, I looked forward to it. Clearly I wasn’t alone: this book went on to win both the 2010 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The poems in this book worked the way the earlier ones had, but the expectations of their readers had changed. These poems no longer felt difficult, but almost direct in their portrayal of an extraordinary mind moving through a particular experience. The experience that informed them was the poet’s diagnosis of cancer.

There are moments in Versed of surprising clarity. The poem “Around” begins, typically for Armantrout, with a larger philosophical moment–“Time is pleased/to draw itself/out . . .” But the second section of the poem is almost frighteningly direct:

Chuck and I are pleased
to have found a spot

where my ashes can be scattered.

It looks like a construction site

now

but it’s adjacent

to a breathtaking, rocky coast.

The third section of the poem first quotes what might be the language of commerce or advertising, but then contrasts it with the perception of the desperately ill speaker:
“The future
is all around us.”

It’s a place,

anyplace

where we don’t exist.

As frank as that is, it is not the final tone of this collection. Armantrout survived her illness; her cancer is in remission. There are no platitudes here. This poet would never accept or believe them. Yet the book ends with a kind of direction–“The full force/of the will to live/is fixed/on the next/occasion://someone/coming with a tray,//someone/calling a number.”


https://annarborobserver.com/articles...

[W.B. · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love it when a Pulitzer Committee knows what it's doing! I've been loving this poet's writing since 1980something or other. I've read this book about sixty times so far, and the variant readings each poem affords could fill this house with thousands of other books. When Keats wrote about Negative Capability, this is what he meant. When Mallarme told us that a throw of the dice would NEVER abolish chance, this is the infinitely renewable resource towards which he was beckoning. This poet invented a new genre, what I like to call epistemological lyricism. Dreams. Quantum Physics. Epistemological Conundrums. Using these strange candy bricks, Armantrout builds and rebuilds the fairy tale houses of "the real."

[John Pappas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Almost maddeningly compelling and addicting. Quiet, enigmatic and at the same time explosive and direct. The paradox of Rae Armantrout's spare poetry lies in her clever manipulation of the colloquial phrase, the overheard-from-TV non-sequitur or the absurd-when-out-of-context term of art. This collection, comprised of "Versed" and "Dark Matter", is a masterful study of the dialectically opposed -- the real and unreal, temporal and eternal, material and abstract, metaphor and object. Often referred to as the most lyrical of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, Armantrout's clever verse never strays too far from the subjectivity of the heart, while her subversion of "expectation" and "meaning" constantly leave you on uncertain ground.

[Dan · Rating 2 out of 5]

Alas not my kind of poetry and I knew it by the fourth or fifth poem. They did not evoke enough imagery for my enjoyment.

I’ve now read most of the Pulitzer Poetry Prize winners and the Critics Circle winners over the past fifty years and there have been some disappointments but generally these awards have been good a guide for me.

2 stars

[Farren · Rating 4 out of 5]

A lovely articulation of the spaces-and-states-between, the un-sayable. I don't think of the language as "terse" so much as "rigorously refined"; there is not an extra ounce of fat on this book, and yet it is as sonically logical and sound as the sounds water makes. Just marvelous.

[Beetle The Bard · Rating 1 out of 5]

I didn’t understand any of it. It was painful, but I read it all.

[cam · Rating 4 out of 5]

"As a word is
mostly connotation,

matter is mostly aura?

Halo?

(The same loneliness that separates me
from what I call “the world.”)"

[Gabriel H. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Can't say that I understood it all, but impressive in its commitment to play, to strangeness, and to invention.

[Emilie Guan · Rating 3 out of 5]

*2.5 stars
unfortunately not really the poetry style for me

favorites were Bonding, What We Mean, Djinn, Apartment, and Pass

[Garrett Gomez · Rating 4 out of 5]

this is definitely some poetic ass shit!

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

lots a little light

[Brian]

Mostly not the type of poetry that I connect the most with though there were a few in here that took my breath away.

[Amy · Rating 2 out of 5]

National Book Award Finalist
2010 Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry

Versed by Rae Armantrout made me feel pretty ignorant (more than usual anyway!). I know that her work has always been highly respected, but when I first picked it up, I just didn’t get it. A few phrases, here and there, would resonate, but then the lines would go off the track I imagined they were on. I’m fine with stream-of-consciousness writing, but that doesn’t describe it either. Quite simply, I was lost. I put the collection down to return to another time.

In the meantime, The New Yorker had an article about Armantrout’s winning the Pulitzer Prize for this collection, and explained in length not just her biography but her status as a Language poet. Language poets were once a cultural rebellion against Post- Modern poets, but have now become more mainstream, and of them, she’s known as the best. The essay explained how her poems are often cryptic with double meanings and turns that are meant to wake up the reader, to shock them out of numb reality.

With this in mind, I went back and reread each piece. I confess that most are still over my head, I can’t make the connections. But a few really did give me pause. And I think that is how she should be read: not in a hurry to finish but to slowly unravel.

From Outer:

“I’m the one who can’t know if the scraggly old woman putting a gallon of vodka in her shopping cart feels guilty, defiant, or even glamorous as she does so. She may imagine herself as an actress playing an alcoholic in a film.


Removal activates glamour?

To see yourself as if from the outside – though not as others see you.”

All in all, trying to figure out the meanings was fascinating, like the first few games of Sudoku. But after awhile, just as Sudoku gets more difficult, this felt like more work than I was willing to invest. I just don’t have that in me, to understand what these mean. I am too simple for these complexities. However, someone with a stronger background in poetry, especially Language poetry, would likely enjoy this special collection.

[Morbid Swither · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maybe, just not my “kind” of poetry. Virtuosity on display, quite apparently, but missing the magic of truly poetic poetry if that makes sense. At least, for me.

[Laura Walton Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now this book, I like.

It took four read-throughs for me to really find my way into Rae Armantrout's collection. At first I merely enjoyed the challenging beauty of the imagery, the language, the strange voice; I persisted, though, and after a couple of close reads and a couple of quick, cover-to-cover passes, I loved it for its sense. Armantrout has a philosopher's soul with a poet's mind, and this collection addresses (addresses? More like evokes-by-demonstrating) some pretty big issues.

What is the nature of consciousness? What exactly is it that might be lost when one dies? What's a person or thing's real identity, and what is "real" anyway?

Armantrout manages to wade through these issues as an almost pure observer without lapsing into simplistic solipsism. It seems that the poet ran all these questions through her mind and resisted every easy answer that arose; Versed is the record of that cognition. From "Heaven":

...

"Imaginary" meaning
"seen by humans"

...

I'd like to come back to this book in exegesis mode; it seems that it would be a very rewarding text for the critic. For now, though, I'm starting Armantrout's latest collection, Just Saying. I hope it's every bit as challenging, darkly witty, and pitted with unexpected depths as Versed.

[Antonia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am absolutely in love with this book and will be back to write a review. This is the one that won the 2010 Pulitzer in Poetry. I'd always thought I wouldn't like Armantrout because she's . . . well, a language poet, right? And then I heard her read at AWP in February. And I was amazed. It felt as though I'd just woken up to poetry again after a long nap.

Ron Silliman has said:

“Trying to read a book by Rae Armantrout in a single sitting is like trying to drink a bowl of diamonds. What’s inside is all so shiny & clear & even tiny that it appears perfectly do-able. But the stones are so hard & their edges so chiseled that the instant you begin they’ll start to rip your insides apart.”

The first thing I'm going to do, before writing a review, is start over at the beginning.

[Bea · Rating 3 out of 5]

The GR description of this Pulitzer Prize book of verse is more complete that I can write. My experience of poetry is limited, so I am not a good judge of what makes poetry award-winning.

I did not like the first section of this free thought-roaming verse. I could not grasp the subject or thread that held any of it within a frame. None of it spoke to me, and I was left wondering if I would be able to finish the book.

However, the second part of the book, "Dark Matter", was a different experience. In this section, it was clear that the unifying thread was her experience with cancer. The thoughts that were expressed in the poetry made sense to me, even though in some ways they were as free-floating as the first section of the book. This time they had a context for me.

[Rick · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the very best books by this incredible poet. I tried hard to read it slowly, but it wasn't easy to do that -- the jagged words and the crags of insight carved with them are so compelling as to demand page-turning.

Check this out:

"The spread / of vicious talent contests / mimics the selection / of those best adapted / to the stage / of service industry capitalism."

Amazing enough on its own, but then the next stanza is:

"One tells the story / of his illness / in such a way / as to make the others love him best."

These kinds of shifting floodlights make these often quiet poems brilliant to me. I will be rereading these poems for a very long time.

[Courtney Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love language poets. LOVE them. As far as I'm concerned they always get top of the class. But I will still admit that at least 15% of this book went straight over my head. My problem, not hers. I loved it. I kept forcing people to read passages, and scribbling down others when no one was around to bug. Now I'm a little reluctant to give it back to the library. Rae Armantrout summed it up herself in Fade,

So much happiness
is caged
in language,

ready
to burst out
anytime

and fade

THIS is how you earn yourself a Pulitzer.

[Mr. · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm halfway through this book and I'm surprised that I haven't fallen asleep yet. This the least evocative poetry I have ever read. I will most likely not edit my review when I actually finish the book (I might not finish it anyway; I'm feeling drowsy). Most of the poems are nonsensical and ambiguous. No emotions are elicited when I read them. I'm just trying to finish the book so it can collect dust on my shelf for the rest of its life.