Poetry Readers Challenge discussion
2014 Reviews
>
Just Saying, by Rae Armantrout
date
newest »
newest »
This is great, Antonia. I'll pick it up. Thanks.
Mod
Jen, My favorite of her collections is stil Versed, which won the Pulitzer in 2010. Another fantastic title. Versed (pronounced VER-sed) is a brand name of midazolam — used, among other things, for inducing sedation and amnesia. Hmmm... I thought I'd reviewed it here, but I see I only promised to do so! I should make that a New Year's Resolution!
Mod
I read Just Saying quickly, but marked many pages to return to. First off, I love the title. I only wish I’d thought of it first. Just saying: What we say when we want to make a point and yet maintain a light, inoffensive tone. I feel as if Armantrout is saying “Here’s something I happened to notice. Have you noticed that? Have you been thinking the same thing? Is this perhaps something we should keep in mind?” At the same time, the title calls to mind WCW’s “This is just to say.” In both cases, the point is in saying it. We all write poems just to say, don’t we?
What I love about Armantrout is that the reader is necessarily involved in the poem making. You have to read between lines, fill in the blanks, and connect the dots. Certain lines leap off the page and grab me. Others send me back to the beginning of the poem. I always feel immersed, part of the poem, as if looking around it from inside it. As if. A phrase that Armantrout uses a lot.
As if the light
at the end of
tunnel vision
were the glare
of the delivery room
pulled
from memory’s
grab bag;
as if we’d come
full circle,
so to speak, though
this time
no one was talking
— from “Things”
I also admire the way two or more voices may be braided together in a single poem. Sometimes they are the voices of government, media, a sign in the airport, the clichés of modern life — they way they capture and play off our collective experience. And sometimes they’re internal voices arguing with, or colluding with, one another — perhaps both at once.
The poems, taken together, offer a portrait of life in the 21st century, one in which we still have choices (but may not always) and yet are bewildered and stymied by them. No matter what we choose, will the result be tolerable? According to which of our many selves? The one in real time? The one who listens in on our interior monologue? Perhaps the one who knows that the sense of choice is only that: the sense of it.
Serious themes, yes. But delivered with the most delightful wordplay, with all the subtleties of sound and sense we find in our best poetry. Some WCW, a little e.e., and a dash of Kay Ryan. Armantrout herself has said: “[P]oetry, at least the poetry I value, can reproduce our conflicts and fractures and yet be held together in the ghost embrace of assonance and consonance, in the echoed and echoing body of language.” (Collected Prose, Singing Horse Press, 2007)
The power of language is ever present. Before I started reading Armantrout, I’d heard she was a “language poet,” and I already believed I didn’t “like” language poetry. Fortunately, I heard her read at an AWP meeting some years ago and had my little closed mind blown. Reading Armantrout makes me feel as if I’ve been going about my life in a daze. Every poem seems like a wake-up call. “What is the meaning of clarity? Armantrout asks. “Is something clear when you understand it or when it looms up, startling you?” (Collected Prose, Singing Horse Press, 2007)
If we think dying
is like falling
asleep,
then we believe
wrongly, rightly
that it’s a way
of sinking into
what happens,
joining the program
in process
— from “Progress”
Ange Mlinko has called Armantrout’s poetry incisive and chilling. I have to agree. And would add ironic, skeptical, provocative, wry, and witty.
But in the end, as in the last lines of the last poem in this collection,
everything’s
a metaphor
for sensation.
— from “Stop and Go”