Interview with Rae Armantrout

In this week’s issue, we had a piece on poet Rae Armantrout, who was in the area for a reading and talk last week. Here is the rest of the interview with Armantrout, as conducted by Weekly writer Daniel Benjamin over email; follow-up questions, conducted in person and lightly edited, are preceded by an asterisk.

You have written about this before, in interviews and in your memoir True, but I’m wondering if you could say something about how your upbringing, education, and poetic influences have figured into your poetry?

I was alone a lot when I was growing up. I was an only child and there was alcoholism in my family so I often wanted to stay out of the way. I think that has affected my work in a couple of ways. First, I tended to entertain myself by reading and writing. And then, of course, I was a lonely child. I think that original loneliness shows up in my poems. I often seem to be looking at things from a distance. I don’t know how confessional I want to get here. As I’ve said before, my mother was a fundamentalist. That means I was exposed to the Bible. When I was looking for reading material, it was always there in all its strangeness. On the other hand, my exposure to dogma made me ornery.

In a previous interview you used the metaphor of a “faux-collage” to describe the use of found language in your poetry. Could you go into more detail about how you go about forming a poem? Do you think this practice is different from “recording and editing,” which Eileen Myles describes as the general mode of avant-garde poetry?

At the most basic level, I am always waiting for a poem. Let’s say I have a line in the water. I often begin a poem when I feel puzzled by something, when I feel there’s more to something than meets the eye. To go back to the fishing metaphor, I feel a hit on the line. I don’t know what it is, but if it has some heft and fight, I’ll try to pull it in. That doesn’t sound very postmodern. Let me switch to a different metaphor. I’ve always got antennae up. They’re filtering the static. When something stands out as odd and maybe troubling, they record it for later.

I write in bits and pieces. Some of the pieces may be things I’ve seen in a commercial or heard in a popular song or read in a book about physics or neuroscience. Generally, wherever they come from, these pieces are things that make me say “Huh?” or WTF. I mix such found material, which may or may not be in quotes, and which may or may not be literally quoted, with material from my own thought processes and experiences. I tend to treat the different materials in the same way. I guess I say “faux collage” because collage uses all found materials while I combine internal and external sources.

*Do you find that reading poetry is part of your “research” in the same way that reading TV Guide or listening to conversation is?

*TV Guide sadly pretty much no longer exists now that everyone can get the guide right on their remote. But I’d probably exhausted that resource anyway. Yeah, sometimes when I’m in the mood to write but nothing is coming to me, I’ll warm up by reading some poetry. I recently wrote a poem called “Errands” (not yet published) which retells the Little Red Riding Hood story. I started writing that after reading a sentence in something by Kish Song Bear that invoked the same fairy tale.

Much of the found language in your poems is familiar to the reader, or evokes familiar contexts. Since your poems display “the interventions of capitalism into consciousness” (to quote your interview with Lyn Hejinian), they seem to alter those contexts for your readers: illuminating, problematizing, re-enchanting, questioning. Do you see your use of familiar language as aiding or instructing readers to see those words and contexts differently?

Yes, in a way. I don’t want to be pedantic. I’m just trying to recreate for the reader the experience I had. If something made me do a double take, I want to make the reader look twice too. I guess one example might be these lines from my poem “Integer” (in Versed).

These temporary credits

will no longer be reflected

in your next billing period.

Those words were lifted directly from my phone bill. I was in a state of mind which allowed me to hear their somewhat ominous tone. Is this our modern version of “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may?” I guess I wanted to reader to hear that too. In the larger poem that section occurs in relation to a consideration of reflection in general.

*What do you think about Flarf, and do you think it is related to your work?

*Well, I think that there’s some kind of “proto-Flarf” in Language poetry. In my work I sometimes quote the media in a critical spirit. I don’t know if the Flarfists would agree, but most of their quotation seems to be critical although it’s presented deadpan. I’m glad that Flarf exists. It’s got some bite to it. It seems to have a spirit of critique that I think is useful. But on the other hand I wouldn’t want all poetry to be Flarf poetry. It seems like it’s all teeth. And I appreciate teeth, but you wouldn’t want all teeth. I’m glad they’re out there though.

*It seems like your appropriation of language takes on a lot of different tones, sometimes it seems to reflect a really deep alienation, an anger—like Flarf—and sometimes it’s more humorous, and self-reflexive. Do you think that’s an antagonism in your work? There are some poems in which people laugh and they’re funny, and then there are some poems that are also angry.

*Or even both. I’m interested in the different voices that I have in my own head, or that I have in my experience, and the different tone modalities that can come into a work, the kinds of friction that happens when these different sorts of discourses rub up against each other. I think humor and anger are often two sides of the same coin, by the way.

In True you wrote: “‘Why?’ and ‘What do you mean?’ didn’t seem to have been allowable questions in my home. Now I can’t stop asking them.” Could you expand on the idea that skepticism can be transgressive, specifically the skepticism in your poetry? I’m thinking of your essay on feminist poetics where you link subversion to a disruption of clarity.

We never seem to be skeptical enough. Remember when the world was going to end if our representatives didn’t vote to give lots of government money to investment banks? And now the University of California (where I work) is going to crumble if we don’t all agree to higher tuition, lower pay, and work load increases. I know what I’m saying right now isn’t original—but we never seem to learn! Poetry, the poetry I care about anyway, makes us slow down and think twice about what we’re reading, what we’re seeing. It makes us wonder and doubt. I think that’s good practice.

*I wanted to ask about the more philosophical side of your poetry. It seems like your skepticism, in addition to querying the outside world and the media, is often directed inward at the self and the possibility of experience, which is the more traditional philosophical kind of skepticism. So for instance at the end of the penguins poem, “Solution”: “You won’t get far//You’re the thing/that waits//to trap/each passing thought,//the anxious/blank/that God loves.” Can you expand on those thoughts?

*Well obviously it interests me to think about what the self is. Sometimes we feel as if our real self is some kind of essence to which things happen. But if the essence of the self is separate from everything that happens to it, then it’s essentially blank. And actually, interestingly or sadly, having a blank mind, having nothing going on, is usually an uncomfortable feeling. So we reach out constantly for stimulation. How should we picture the self? “Solution” pictures the self in a couple of ways. First as the active little pilgrim/penguin we’ve been treated to in movies lately. Then as a spider waiting for a tremor on its draglines. “You won’t get far//You’re the thing/that waits//to trap/each passing thought.”

*Do you read any philosophy as a part of your reading?

*Yeah. Lately I’ve been trying, although he’s very difficult, to read Badiou. The poem that I didn’t read last night, the one I said I’d skip, has a quote from him in it. Maybe I should have read it: this is after all the University of Chicago. I often get inspiration from things that I can just barely understand whether it’s physics or difficult philosophy. So sometimes I’ll read it deliberately to get my mind to that stage of puzzlement where I’m going, really? And somehow that sends me off into a poem sometimes.

In recent years many Language poets have received increased recognition in some kind of “mainstream”—for example, your books are now published by Wesleyan University Press. Charles Bernstein holds a named chair at an Ivy League university. Your book Versed was nominated for a National Book Award—and all five finalists were judged “excellent” by Ron Silliman on his blog. Do you have thoughts on what it means for poets to be accepted into a kind of mainstream, academic or otherwise? Does this kind of recognition affect your work?

I get asked this question a lot these days. And compared to _________I’m not terribly “successful.” All I know is that the impulses and strategies in my work have been very much the same since I started publishing in the late ‘70s. Maybe the poems have gotten more complicated (maybe less). That’s for the reader to decide. Subjectively, however, my writing process feels much the same. I get depressed if I don’t write. That may go back to my childhood (see question one). I’m very pleased that my poems are getting a somewhat larger readership. It puts me in touch with new people. I was thrilled the other day when a physics professor from Simon Fraser wrote to ask permission to use one of my poems in a display he was making. On the other hand, readership is still quite small in absolute terms. As John Ashbery once said (or so I hear), “Being a famous poet is not the same thing as being a famous person.”

*I wanted to ask more about what you think Language poetry means and thinking about it as a movement versus just as a way of writing.

*Language Poetry began with groups of friends in New York and in the Bay area, and I was living in the Bay area then. I had known Ron Silliman from college and I met the rest of them basically through him. So being young we had a lot of free time and spent a lot of time in bars and people’s living rooms having conversations and, of course, we influenced each other. Even though now, and really always, our writing looked very different—certainly on the surface my writing could not possibly look more different from Ron Silliman’s—I do think we have some things in common. We (and I’m not saying we’re the only poets who did this) allowed for a kind of space between sentences or between statements, between stanzas, spaces for uncertainty, where the connections between what came last and what comes next are problematized and open to reader interpretation. So whatever our poems might look like, they have that in common. And maybe the kind of the skepticism you mentioned is something we have in common too because we did come up in a time that’s not so unlike recent times, where there were politicians lying to us about a war and media being partisan without admitting to being partisan. But over the years we’ve moved to different places and we’ve diverged. I still respect the work and the thought of all those people though.

*It seems surprising to me, in 2010, picking up The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book and looking at it, that a lot of people I’m reading about are now sort of at the peak of the poetry establishment. Does that strike you as strange?

*I would say the peak of the poetry establishment is still better represented by people like Louise Gluck, Jorie Graham, Mark Strand, etc. But you’re right that some of us have become well known to readers of poetry. It does surprise me a little bit, but I don’t think it would have surprised, say, Ron Silliman. I think he sort of imagined this future.

*I guess the interesting thing for me is that in addition to the bravura of Language poetry, there’s also a strong anti-establishment attitude.

*Well, you know, I get that kind of question a lot now. And, I mean, what are you going to do? I really haven’t changed, and if people invite me to be in magazines, I guess I could say no—but in fact, Paul Muldoon wrote to me the first time, and solicited work from me [for the New Yorker], so what are you going to say, No? I mean, if the poems reach more people that way, I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Unless you’re chasing it in some kind of pandering way. But I don’t feel like I am.

*Could you talk about Money Shot, one of the new poems you read yesterday?

*Well it starts out “IndyMac,” which is the name of one of the first banks that went under. To my own surprise when I was looking through some old notebooks I found that I had written down the name of the IndyMac bank even before the current crisis just because somehow the word “Mac” which suggests McDonald’s, but also now “Mac’ing down” on something, or “PAC-man”— suggests a greedy franchise. And it’s paired with the word Indy, which suggests independent boutiques. IndyMac seemed like a contradiction in terms. So I started with the word IndyMac. Then “Able to exploit pre-/existing”—that’s a phrase that I got from a newspaper article about banking. I don’t remember how the phrase originally concluded. You know, the banking system was able to exploit the pre-existing blah-blah-blah. And then the poem breaks into single syllables: “Tain.//Per. In. Con./Cyst.” All those syllables seem like either prefixes or suffixes— they occur in words like maintain, retain, persist, insist, consist, and then there’s just the word—cyst. I guess the words that are just syllables are a kind of cyst, free floating references to acquisition and attainment. As this IndyMac breaks up, what’s left of it but these little fragments of the impulse to grab and retain. That is a way to try to paraphrase the first section.

*There’s also the porn reference in the phrase “money shot” that you mentioned in the reading yesterday.

*I’m not sure there’s a direct porn reference in this. The next section of it is the dream about being on a ship.

Now in a way I did have a “money shot” in mind, but not the porn money shot—the more general meaning of money shot. The money shot of porn, as we all know, is when it becomes obvious that the man has ejaculated. In more general terms, the money shot is where something is revealed. If I could answer the question “Why don’t you just say what you mean?”, that, presumably, would be the money shot. And that actually was from a dream, so I woke up with those words in my mind, and my first thought was, “Well why don’t I?” That would be the money shot. But it doesn’t arrive.

*A line from the last poem you read seemed to me an interesting remark on your work: “Everything I know is something I’ve repeated.”

*I hope that’s not literally true, but there’s some truth to it. I’m afraid that, often, we don’t remember what we’ve experienced so much as we remember what we’ve recounted either to others or to ourselves. I wrote about that in the 10^th installment of The Grand Piano [an “experiment in collective autobiography by ten writers associated with the rise of Language poetry in San Francisco” (http://www.thegrandpiano.org/about.html)].

*It seems like your poems also enact that by thinking about things through bits of language and bits of things we see or know in the world.

*That’s what we have to deal with.