New enlightenments awaited in Berkeley, where Armantrout took a poetry class with Denise Levertov, who introduced her to the work of Robert Creeley and encouraged her to think more carefully about line breaks. It was during this period that Armantrout developed one of her signature effects: suspense and surprises set up by line breaks. “The last word in a line tends to have some extra emphasis just because the eye stops there a half second before going on to the next line,” she explains now. “Reading a poem, if I can always tell what’s coming next, I get bored. But when you’re moving from line to line and there are places where you don’t see it coming, there’s a kind of double meaning, because you think the line is going somewhere, and then you come to the next line and you go, ‘Oh, it went a different way,’ and you have both of those possible interpretations or meanings in your mind simultaneously.” (“To each his own / severance package,” she writes in “Instead,” from Just Saying. “The eerie thing / is that ghosts don’t exist.”) “Who doesn’t like it,” she says, “when you see for the first time that Y is like X? I like to discover things, and I think that other people like to discover things too, instead of being spoon-fed. I also have a short attention span, and get bored by explanation; I want to get to the good stuff.”
It was in the Bay Area, too, that Armantrout became part of a group of highly serious, anti-confessional, outsider-identified writers known as the Language poets (sometimes rendered L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, after one of the movement’s leading journals), including Silliman, Bob Perelman, Fanny Howe, Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, and others. Influenced by Marx and poststructuralist theorists such as Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, the Language poets were closely attuned to, and suspicious of, the way words could be used to manipulate and deceive; the doublespeak of the U.S. government about the Vietnam War, with its “freedom hamlets,” which had to be destroyed before they could be saved, helped heighten that awareness. The Language poets set about exposing such manipulation, but also co-opting it, glorying in wordplay and double meanings. Many also became expert practitioners of parataxis, in which disparate elements of a poem are not directly linked or compared but merely juxtaposed, their connection oblique, implied, requiring substantial reader participation to construct.
Armantrout would become a master of this technique, often placing musings and mysteries from various scientific realms—in particular anthropology, biology, and physics—in proximity, and perhaps loose correspondence, with scenes from everyday life. “You can hold the various elements of my poems in your mind at one time, but those elements may be hissing and spitting at one another,” Armantrout is quoted as saying in her entry on the Poetry Foundation’s website. (Her poem “Transactions” is included in The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine, published last year by the University of Chicago Press.) In “Dress Up,” from Just Saying, for example, the nature of “virtual particles” and the elusive behavior of electrons precedes a section about a toddler, “who stares at us / until we look up.”
“Flirtatious,” we call it.
She waits
until we get the joke
about being here,
being there.
“The first two parts are about the difficulty scientists have identifying the exact position and behavior of an electron, while the third is about watching a little girl play peekaboo,” Armantrout explains. “They’re two very different milieus, but they’re both about a kind of hide-and-seek, and to juxtapose them is to make a metaphor. If you spun the metaphor out directly—if you said the electron is like the little girl—that would be ridiculous. But if you just juxtapose the two, there’s an oblique resonance that will start to go back and forth between the two parts.”
Armantrout cut a striking figure on the Language poetry scene. A petite young feminist with a working-class background, a love of rock music (she was crazy about Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, and the Stones, among other bands), a self-deprecating humor, and a ferocious intelligence, she was known for an apparent shyness that barely hid a deep well of self-confidence. “She was complicated, always,” remembers Bob Perelman, now a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. “She didn’t come from a sophisticated background, but her work was extremely sophisticated. There were a lot of very high-powered, Marxist, Keats-hating guys who didn’t exactly dominate the scene but were very influential and made a lot of noise—Ron Silliman, Barry Watten, Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews—and Rae, while never a wallflower, did step back from that a bit. She didn’t want a very daunting, theoretical discourse about her work. I remember she reluctantly agreed to do a talk about it once, and during the Q&A period somebody asked her a question about her work. ‘This is why I never wanted to give a talk,’ she said, and everybody burst into laughter.”
At the bottom of that well of self-confidence lay a vaulting ambition, even a competitiveness, the latter occasionally revealed in Armantrout’s delight in board games (and more recently, “Words With Friends,” a Scrabble-like game that can be played over the Internet), at which she excelled. “Often Rae presents herself as ‘I’m just folks,’ you know, ‘Just muddling through’—but when you play a game with her, you’re face to face with a killer shark,” says Silliman, who still plays against her regularly, typically losing two games out of three. “It reminds me of when Jack Gilbert and I were playing Ping-Pong forty years ago, and he was trying to convince me of Henry Miller’s idea that it was the best of games, because you got a chance to see the raw ambition of the opponent staring you right in the face.”
Silliman recalls an after-party in Berkeley following a reading by Robert Creeley in which Armantrout fretted over how long it might take for the then-dominant generation of poets, Creeley and W. S. Merwin and Allen Ginsberg and John Ashbery, to clear the field enough for her own generation to inherit their audience. “I told her that you don’t inherit audiences,” he remembers. “I said that we were going to have to put our own audience together, one reader at a time.” Even then, though, Armantrout saw herself as an heir to the greats. As Silliman puts it, “She always thought on the scale of Ezra Pound and Emily Dickinson.”
And while her association with the Language movement was important to Armantrout, it did not shape her. “I think I came out of what I was drawn to, more than what I was reacting against,” she says now. “I was always more interested in my thoughts and impressions than I was in narrative, or in telling stories about myself. I wanted to get to things that interested me, not so much to tell how I got there.” And so it was that by the time she came to know many of the Language poets, she had already written many of the poems published in her first collection, Extremities (Figures, 1978), in which the characteristics of her later work—in particular, its brevity, specificity, and concision—were clearly established. “She appears to have dropped from the womb and started writing,” Silliman says. “Of all the Language poets, with the possible exception of Bruce Andrews, Rae was the one who started out the most fully formed.” She was also the most broadly successful. “If you did a Venn diagram with poetry, the academy, and trade publishing as the three circles,” he says, “Rae and Charles Bernstein are the only two Language poets who would fall into all three categories, with popular success in terms of publishing, critical reception, and the total admiration of their peers.”
In the fall of 1978 Armantrout and Korkegian settled back in their hometown, where she began teaching (and still does) at the University of California in San Diego. She missed the intellectual ferment and bustle of San Francisco—“It felt like an exile to her, at first,” Perelman recalls—but over time she came to embrace the city’s relative quiet. “It was good for my writing,” she says. “There’s more downtime, more solitude here, and that’s helpful.” Still, she has never entirely reconciled herself to life in San Diego, which she described in the Newsweek essay as “a city without charisma,” with a stillness, even a silence, at its center.
Our city “fathers” (do we still say that?) started trying to cover the silence over by hanging big signs with the names of neighborhoods across our major streets. For instance, in my neighborhood, a sign reading “Normal Heights” has been stationed over Adams Avenue. It reminds me of that scene in One Hundred Years of Solitude in which a plague of amnesia sweeps through the village so that the villagers affix pieces of paper with nouns to every object.… It’s as if this city has decided there’s “no here here,” to adapt a saying (about Oakland) by Gertrude Stein, and is trying to remedy the situation. Leave it alone, I say. In my mature years I have come to appreciate the blankness of this town. When I step on the street in San Diego, I am not stepping onto a set; I am not stepping into a play, my own or anyone else’s.
This last argument cut no ice with a number of Armantrout’s fellow San Diegans, including Matthew T. Hall, a columnist at the city’s daily newspaper, the Union-Tribune. “Maybe San Diego isn’t as sophisticated as your poetry,” Hall wrote, in high dudgeon, “but a city without charisma? C’mon! You don’t have to be a booster, but you shouldn’t be a buzz kill. Sugar, Rae. You live here! Do you leave your house?”
Yes, she leaves her house, often to sit in front of that patio fireplace that replaced the elm and survey the garden her husband has built so assiduously. She keeps busy, in this once-unlooked-for bonus period of her life, writing her own script. She still loves pop music, with the Decemberists and Adele—“I’m a sucker for a woman (think Janis Joplin, think Tina Turner) singing passionately, full voice, no holds barred,” she has written—her current faves. She’s also a significant consumer of TV and movies, often with fantastical and/or allegorical elements, including True Blood, Game of Thrones, and Pixar’s Wall-E (“about a cute little robot left alone in a world that’s totally trashed—you can’t be more bleak than that, really,” she says), which often filters into her poetry, as in “Haunts”: “On how many bookstore shelves, / lovely, fanged teenagers, / red-eyed, smeared with blood.”
“Her poems refer to modern life, including popular culture, in a way that’s very interesting,” says one of her oldest friends and first readers, the fiction writer Lydia Davis. “They’re very unsentimental, with moments of great lyrical beauty. She certainly references her experience with disease, although I wouldn’t say there’s been a sharp turn toward the personal in that sense. It hasn’t become in any way confessional.”
Perhaps not, though death hovers over it like a black monarch, folding and unfolding its wings. But dying—seen through Armantrout’s scientific, unsentimental eyes in “Progress”—is elementally natural, “a way / of sinking into / what happens, // joining the program / in progress.” In the meantime, as the poet observes in “Remainder,”
The difference
between nothing
and nothingness
is existence.
Kevin Nance is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine.
(Photos: Stephanie Diani.)