by Lydia Davis
I say the three verses may or may not cluster because although they seem to want to cluster around the bank, they are forcibly kept apart not only by spaces on the page but also by printer’s marks serving as asterisks, as though too much surface continuity would obscure the imagery, obscure the voice, just as too much familiar context would obscure what this banker or this bank really is, just as the term “bank manager” rather than “merchant” would also obscure what this man is, and just as too much familiar context for the words themselves, in general, would obscure their force and vitality. So often, in fact, Armantrout’s poems have seemed to be built word by word rather than phrase by phrase, or rather, by now, in this book, phrase by phrase rather than sentence by sentence; they seem to be pieces of language skillfully extracted from the surrounding world and the surrounding language and set by themselves on the page as though experimentally, to see what electrical interaction will take place with other isolated words or phrases. Armantrout plays the role of the passionately questing, methodical, intelligent, well-informed, yet bemused scientist at arm’s length from her experiments, at an ironic distance from what she sees, as though once she begins to understand and then reorganize, for her own greater understanding, fragments of her surrounding world and language, the only reasonable attitude available to her is an attitude of irony.
The logical or narrative continuity has often gone underground and flows there like a water table. Though some poems are tidily laid out, all there on the page—“Postcards,” “Traveling Through the Yard,” “Compound,” “Sigh”—in many more, richer and more provocative with their single words and phrases glittering in their empty spaces, we work hard at making the connections for ourselves, leaping the intervals (or, like Goofy in “Single Most,” running across the synapses, hooting in mock terror).
Some of the fragments taken from the surrounding language are fragments of speech, the speech of characters who usually appear in these pages and the pages of Armantrout’s earlier books frozen in the midst of performing some “typical” piece of action that renders them isolated and pathetic because so bound to the performance of the inevitable: most overtly, for example, there is the “man in / the eye clinic / rubbing his / eye”; in her collection Extremities, a mother reading, “with angry intensity,” “When the Frost is on the Punkin”; also in that book, “the crone” with a “white corsage” who is reading Thunder at Sunset; and in Precedence, an African American man in a Union Jack T-shirt yelling, “Do you have any idea what I mean?”
When people speak, and also when speech appears in the poems unattached to any speaking character, the speech, too, is isolated, spotlighted, and has the plaintive sound of speech that has been used so many times before, in so many other conversations, usually arguments (one of our most crucial forms of conversation), that it is not really our own and suggests, again, how we are trapped into performing in situations that many others have performed in before us: “Do you have any idea what I mean?” Then, from “Entries: look,” where they punctuate—though not always directly related to other material—the several pages of the poem, “IS THAT YOU?” “ARE YOU SICK OF ME?” “DON’T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT!” “WHAT DO YOU WANT?”
Then, finally, from “The Music,” “I can’t seem to get comfortable.” Taken with the line before it, “On every bar the music shifts,” it can apply specifically to the music, characterizing it or characterizing a reaction to it; taken with several more lines that come before it, the sense of it is still larger:
I want to leave someplace out!
To know the world must mean to know how to get through.
On every bar the music shifts.
“I can’t seem to get comfortable.”
“I can’t seem to get comfortable” is also the last line of the last poem in the book, so that not only the first and last poems in the book but also the first and last lines in the book, taken together, frame the book or sum it up quite aptly. They also identify, symbolically, one major aspect of Rae Armantrout’s position as expressed in her work: “So these are the hills of home … ‘I can’t seem to get comfortable.’”
1986
II. “Why Stop with a Barnacle?”: Made to Seem (1995)
I think I used to be more “surreal”—though I was only referencing what I saw.
—Rae Armantrout, 2017
In her letters and other communications, as in her work, she is brief, concise; each word is essential, nothing merely decorative, though in her poems she writes about the decorative in our streets, in our minds, in our culture. Brevity, probably the brevity of distillation, is inherent in her work: the poems themselves are usually not long, the stanzas a few lines, the lines short, often three words, and links are often missing, or merely implied, and a reader makes the links herself, possibly her own inventions. This is work that requires a reader to use his mind; and since Rae Armantrout’s mind is an active, explicit participant in the poem, often, the reader’s mind actively engages with her mind, on the page. She has taken nothing for granted, every idea is tested and tried, off the page and on the page, as every word and arrangement of words is tested and tried. Her reactions, like her wit, are often quick, but her quickness is informed by long, patient thought and work on and off the page.
No, there is no such thing as glibness about her. Glibness is a town thousands of miles away from San Diego. As is Easy Sophistication, Empty Lyricism, World-Weariness, Facile Sententiousness, Idle Chatter. This is not to say she is solemn.
Chevron’s
exemplary rectangles
Humor is not merely within reach but is mixed into the very substance, the flesh, of all her interesting ideas, her observations of our strange society:
Here I protest
the corny names
of destinations like “Dreamland.”
Still, at dawn it’s clear
the seedy club
is, in fact, the state of being—
What does this ingredient of humor do? Is the humor a charge of intense emotion in a form we can tolerate and even enjoy? It is often a humor of incongruity.
* * *
In my communications to her, though to no one else, I tend to put certain words into quotation marks, as for instance “society,” “we,” “poetry,” “happiness.” Why to Rae in particular, and what do the quotation marks do?
They draw attention to a word; they acknowledge the “received” meaning of the word; they also indicate an awareness of complexities of meaning or contradictions often ignored by the common usage of the word.
My own heightened awareness of the words I am using when I communicate with Rae must be partly in response to her great alertness; and my distancing from received notions may be in response to her own ironic distance from everything, including herself: with my quotation marks I am stepping back to join her in the place where she stands to view the world.
What is her subject, then? Contemporary society or culture? Partly, or maybe always, or regularly recurring, but this society or culture in relation to other subjects. In each poem of this brilliantly exact, never obvious collection, a modicum of hard-won understanding is achieved, or at least a good question is asked about the oddities of daily life, the lessons of television, an urban Southern Californian landscape in which nature appears almost as unpredictable and paradoxical as the barely noticing humans who dangle “spontaneous abortions” from rearview mirrors, embarrassed singing crabs, and gloating Green Giants, as well as friends, family, semantics, jobs, trees, teleology, things we see or learn on television, responsibility, animals, dreams, other plants besides trees—here is a son, a mother, a student, Daffy Duck, here is honeysuckle, a barnacle.
Why stop with a barnacle?
What are the plants in Made to Seem, for instance? Two junipers, one palm (p. 8); “slap-happy fronds” (p. 9); the honeysuckle (p. 16); pine, grass (p. 27).
The mother
dreams her thoughts
have parted company
and become
innocent:
pine, grass and wind.
In this piece of “Spans,” how pleasing the language is just here (I stop a moment to admire): “parted company” with its slightly antiquated flavor; the simplicity of “become innocent”; and the skillful line break that gives a teasing ambiguity to the line “dreams her thoughts.” But of course not just the language is arresting, but the whole idea contained in these lines: thoughts parting company and thereby becoming innocent, as though in our minds, habitually, our thoughts cluster and connive in a way less than innocent. And what’s a separated thought as opposed to a congregating thought anyway? Surrounding all this, there is the beguiling idea of dreaming about one’s thoughts as subjects, as characters.
Which reminds me how the satisfaction of reading her work comes from several sources at once: the ear, the eye, and the mind. Under the lens she turns on everything, the refractive lens, a bland world loses its blandness. I see differently because of the way she sees; and I see more clearly. Or, to put it the other way around, I see more clearly because of the way she sees; and I see differently.
To go on with the search for plant life: eucalyptus (p. 30):
Here eucalyptus
leaves dandle,
redundant but syncopated.
(Observe the nice rhythm and alliteration in “dandle, / redundant.”)
“Fields of lilies” (p. 33); “Leaf still / fibrillating on the vine” (p. 38); jacaranda (p. 41); “Outside it was the same as before, scrawny palms and oleanders, their long leaves, ostensible fingers, not pointing, but tumbling in place—plants someone might call exotic if anybody called—and the same birds and hours, presumably, slipping in and out of view” (p. 48)—this from the opening of “Turn of Events,” a prose poem.
How much is conveyed with that one word “presumably”: a ladylike, discriminating word; critical, high heels in the grass; issuing from the vocabulary of the philosopher, doubting, questioning; from the scientist—are these in fact the same birds, or different birds?
“Ostensible,” “if anybody called.” So often she looks for location, sequence, logic, ascertainable facts, and finds that everything is temporary, or conditional, or out of sequence, contradicted, contradicted again, in the face of the questioning “I”: things qualified often, often coming up against opposing forces (of contradiction or qualification).
She reads philosophy, she reads psychology, she reads science, and what she observes is the everyday, the ordinary, “our” behavior: she tries to make sense of it all, or tries to verify that there is no sense in it; she seeks answers, or at least more questions.
(She is modest; she admits to what she hasn’t read and doesn’t know. But she is not falsely modest. And she will not let mere politeness get in the way of the truth. If she thinks I am wrong about some of this, or not entirely right, she will tell me.)
Continuing the search: cabbages (p. 49). Or, rather, cabbages (suddenly looking, in italics, like an unfamiliar vegetable, named in Arabic, say, in a Moroccan market):
Forever drawing water through a maze of
cabbages?
Junipers and palms again (p. 51), “a spate of slick, / heart-shaped leaves” (p. 57), bamboo (p. 58, last page). The bamboo takes part in a comment about writing that, as usual with her work, gives one something to think about for more than a little while:
Coarse splay
of bamboo
from the gullies,
I write,
as if I’d been expecting
folds of lace.
Which makes me think of another spot in the book where she comments specifically, as she writes, about the act of writing, something she doesn’t do very often. From “The Known”:
A dog’s bark whooshes by, looming large on the night-
time or suddenly anonymous street. I could be disqualified
for writing, “suddenly”—or could have been “if the
truth were known.” It’s the job of the poem to find
homes for all these noises.
A nice notion, homes for noises; and what comes before poses several more questions for thought—or layers of questions, which is a way of composing that builds up the complexity (and thus the richness) of her work.
Hunting through the book like this, I find fewer plants than I expected, and more “abstract ideas”: from which I conclude that a few plant forms very particularly and distinctly mentioned must make the impression of many plant forms; and this much abstraction still does not leave the impression of abstract verse, but, magically, of very concrete verse—lively and sensual.
But the plant life is not some romantic host: it is what manages to survive or is manipulated in a Southern Californian urban landscape: It is plant life in relation, again, to our society—a flowering vine, probably accidental, growing over an ugly man-made structure:
A honeysuckle,
thrown like an arm
around a chain-link fence
And what strange beauty she creates out of a mixed situation, a situation (for the plants and animals) that could be said to be dismal. Beauty that comes not only from the particularity of her observing eye—the honeysuckle, the eucalyptus—but from the equal particularity of her language, marrying visual detail with strong, pleasing sound: twitching, sync, fronds.
She uses any available vocabulary with equal aplomb. She uses the language of everyday overheard speech:
“Well, look who…”
though she then takes it to a conclusion that requires some mental agility from us in order to “understand” it:
“Well, look who missed
the fleeting moment,”
Green Giant gloats
She uses the languages of stylistics and music: “redundant but syncopated.” (She demands that we “hear” with our eye the syncopation of a leaf.)
She uses jargon happily, for instance the jargon of “our” nuclear industry, the simplest of words but already fraught, before she picks them up, with a burden of many-colored agony—
… protective gear …
and puts them in the service of a scene that shows a comforting image of a past, simpler way of life (what Mother does once a week in the morning, as it used to be) with the broadest comic possibilities:
There’s someone familiar
in a beauty shop,
wearing protective gear
Her comedy depends in part on surprise, the unexpected. But then everything in her verse, comic or not, is fresh, surprising, unpredictable. Not only is her humor often a humor of incongruity: incongruity is a recurring characteristic of the poems generally.
The language of math (here, geometry) has a natural and easy place in her work, too. This from “Turn of Events,” which involves a woman going into a house and out again onto a porch and standing on the porch:
Shape was the only evidence. She went back in. She should think about how the house was built or how it was paid for. How a feeling can have a shape for so long, say an oblong, with sun falling in a series of rhomboids on its wooden strips. It would have an orientation.
And beyond the questions of vocabularies, more generally how she can gather in and deploy language in more classical fashion for rhetorical effect when she wishes, as in the last stanza of the book:
Mine was about
escaping Death though
Death was stylized, somehow,
even stylish. So was I!
So I was hidden
among fashionable allies.
Observe the handling of repetition or echo: “Death though / Death,” “stylized, somehow, / even stylish,” “So was I! / So I was.” The faux naivete of the exclamation point. The humor—dark, as often—of this linking of death and style. And the faux innocence, more generally, of the telling of this dream, which acts as a foil to that dark humor. So much is done with a single exclamation point (as, above, with a selective use of italics).
And it seems that the longer I look, the more I discover: it strikes me only now, for i
nstance, probably as I read the word “bamboo” yet one more time, how Armantrout’s poems sometimes hearken to sensibilities to the west of her California home (though “Eastern” to us) in their tone or their approach; how there is an unexpected obeisance in her work to a different tradition, in the delicacy with which evocations of natural features punctuate her expressions of human emotion. How surprised we are, as we have been surprised before by other things in the work, that from a marriage of the U.S. Navy (her father) and a fundamentalist kind of Christian faith (her mother) come, now, these shades of Matsuo Bashō!
1995, 1999
Small but Perfectly Formed:
Five Favorite Short Stories
“Dante and the Lobster,” by Samuel Beckett. Anything by Beckett, of course, but particularly this story, for the deadly (and deadpan) precision and accuracy of its conclusion: “Well, thought Belacqua, it’s a quick death, God help us all,” followed by “It is not.”
* * *
Again, almost any story by Grace Paley because of her brilliantly dense style, her economy, her humor, and the generous reach of her spirit. “Wants” is all of two pages, involving an ex-husband and a library fine of $32, family life, and antiwar activism.
* * *
Flannery O’Connor’s “Everything That Rises Must Converge” for its cleverness, its wry integration of the colloquial speech of its characters (the naively bigoted mother and the martyred son), its cutting humor and deft portraiture.