The front yard of Rae Armantrout’s modest house in San Diego is an exotic garden of desert plants, few indigenous to Southern California: euphorbia from Yemen and the Canary Islands, a palm from Madagascar, frankincense from Somalia, proteus from South Africa. All were collected by her husband, Chuck Korkegian, to withstand drought and the couple’s frequent absences while Armantrout, who won the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for her eighth poetry collection, Versed (Wesleyan University Press, 2009), gives readings around the country. In her new book, Just Saying, published this month by Wesleyan, the yard—once “a blond patch,” she writes in “My Taste,” now “a stylish desert, / bronze crushed granite // between bushes / flowering furiously”—makes a number of appearances. “My leaves form bells, / topknots, / small cups of sex, // overweening, unstoppered,” a euphorbia boasts in “Scripture.” “Not one of you / with all your practice // is so extravagantly / coiffed.” 

The most haunting vegetal presence of all is an absence. A majestic elm once stood near the house, shading the yard; handsome but inconvenient, its roots invaded the sewer line and lifted the slab of the patio, where the couple envisioned building an outdoor fireplace. With money from Armantrout’s 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship, they had the tree uprooted and carted off. “We came home one day and the tree had been taken down,” Korkegian recalls. “There were a couple of birds that used to perch in the tree now sitting on a butterfly bush, which was so thin that it couldn’t bear their weight. The birds were staring in the direction of where the tree had been. We felt so guilty that we climbed into bed in the middle of the day, depressed.” In Just Saying’s “New Intelligence,” Armantrout imagines an alternate universe in which “I’m gone // and the shadows / of the leaves // of the elm I had pulled down // still make a fuss / over the earth.”

In one way, the passage is unusual in Armantrout’s poetry, in which personal anecdotes are sporadic and spare. Like many of the so-called Language poets, the Bay Area collective with which she was closely associated in the 1970s and ’80s, she mostly steers clear of the confessional mode, looking outward rather than inward, nearly to the point of self-erasure. Her famously short lines—observational, aphoristic, elliptical—focus on what’s being seen and done, not who’s seeing or doing it. “Things that happen to me do get into my poems, but I don’t tend to provide much backstory,” says Armantrout, sixty-five, lounging on the leather sofa in her living room one uncharacteristically drizzly winter afternoon. “If I was walking to the store and I saw something that shocked or intrigued me, I wouldn’t start with, ‘As I was walking to the store…’ I would jump directly to the interesting sight, but it’s me seeing it, right?” Despite the rarity of the word I in her work—when it does appear, it’s often in the voice of someone not herself (occasionally God, in whom she does not believe)—her readers are always aware of the poet’s sharp, controlling intelligence. We feel her there, like that missing elm, her shadow fussing over the page.

In another way, however, the reference to the late, lamented tree—and a world in which the speaker is no more—is part of a new, elegiac mode that entered Armantrout’s work in Versed, written in the aftermath of surgery and chemotherapy treatment in 2006 for what was believed to be an aggressive form of cancer of the kidney. The prognosis was grim; most people with the disease died within six months of diagnosis. “We got on a plane and went to a rainforest resort in Costa Rica, paying attention to each and every moment,” Korkegian remembers with a catch in his throat. “It was a time in which Rae expressed an appreciation for the life that she’d had. She was glad to have written long enough to receive some recognition, but she was also sad—for the end of our relationship, for not being able to see our son get married. There was a sense that time had slowed down, and we did a lot of living in a fairly short time.” Accordingly, in “Dark Matter,” the harrowing sequence that comprises the second half of Versed, the poet struck a deeply personal note, indivisible from her own specific existence, which is to say her coming nonexistence. “Chuck and I are pleased / to have found a spot / where my ashes can be scattered,” she reported in a dream sequence (which happened to parallel an actual incident) in “Around.” “Death is a smudge / on a film,” she mused in “The Light,” “a spot / on the horizon.” 

“Rae’s work has gotten deeper, particularly as she’s gotten older and had some reverses in life,” says her friend of more than forty years, the poet and critic Ron Silliman. “Her struggle with cancer gave her a depth of understanding about confronting death that’s almost without parallel in American poetry. I can’t think of anyone who writes about it as meaningfully as she does.”

As it happened, the tumor on Armantrout’s kidney did not recur; the surgery and chemo were apparently successful. Six years later, the cancer is still in remission, although her regular six-month checkups remain a source of anxiety. The specter of death, that uninvited guest, has crossed the threshold of her thoughts and can never be expelled. “Even if I don’t die of cancer, I’m no longer young, so mortality is often on my mind,” she says matter-of-factly. “I admit that I think about it a lot.” And so, after the thematic detour of Money Shot, which was published by Wesleyan in 2011, the shadows dance again in Just Saying, in which “My dead friends / don’t visit me; // they say I didn’t / know them” (“Remainder”), and in which, in “Ghosted,” “a black monarch / sits, folding / and unfolding / its wings.”

Where their living room once featured a hospital bed, it is dominated, on the gloomy December day of my visit, by a Christmas tree, its multicolored lights burning bright. “A normalcy has returned,” Korkegian ventures, “and the assumption is that we will wake up alive and continue to be so.” 

“Not so much,” his wife jokes, sort of.

Growing up in the 1950s in the working-class San Diego subdivision of Allied Gardens, built on the Levittown model, Rae Armantrout—she knows little about her unusual last name, as her father, a career Navy man, was adopted—manifested an early interest in poetry. Her mother read children’s verse to her, and, as she grew older, longer, somewhat more complex works such as Longfellow’s “Hiawatha.” But from the very beginning, little Rae seems to have shared the minimalist, imagist instincts of one of her eventual idols, William Carlos Williams. Her first poem, written as a first-grader, read in its entirety: 

The little fish swim
around and around
and away.

But there was little in the budding poet’s background that suggested a career in the art. “I didn’t really know for sure that there were any living poets,” Armantrout says. “The idea that you could grow up to be any sort of working artist was completely foreign to me.” After his retirement from the military, her father worked as a janitor at San Diego State University; her mother was a Christian fundamentalist who continued to proselytize her daughter for years after she became an atheist at the age of twelve. “She always had a preacher who thought he knew when the world was going to end, and she was always trying to convince me to convert by X date, though it always passed without anything happening,” she says. “It caused me to not be as close to my mother as I had been, because she thought I was going to hell.” 

In the seventh grade, one of her teachers gave her an anthology of modern poetry, edited by Louis Untermeyer, in which she discovered the modernists and found herself drawn to the most radical of them, including Williams, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and H. D. The same anthology also introduced her to Emily Dickinson, whose abstraction, spirited debates with God, and interest in mortality resonated. “I was surrounded by really conventional thinking, and I could tell that Dickinson wasn’t afraid to challenge convention, argue with God, and so forth,” Armantrout recalls. “I’m sure she was the first woman poet I read who was bold that way, and she still may be the boldest poet we have.” Inspired, Armantrout began to write poems seriously, albeit secretly, “as I didn’t feel they’d be welcomed.” This proved prescient. When her mother discovered some of her poems—which were “melodramatic and dark and bleak,” she says, “in the usual teenage way”—she encouraged Rae to see a psychiatrist. “She thought, ‘You’re unhappy, obviously, so you must be crazy.’”

Armantrout wasn’t happy, but she wasn’t crazy, either. “I grew up inside a fenced yard in a neighborhood where we didn’t know our neighbors very well,” she says. “All I had was my nuclear family, with whom I didn’t always get along. I was pretty isolated, and to be with other people and trust them, to even go up and ask a stranger for directions, was very difficult for me for a while.” At San Diego State, which she attended for a while before transferring to the University of California in Berkeley, “It’s fair to say that I was bored out of my mind,” she wrote in an essay published in Newsweek last year. “When I was eighteen or nineteen…my friends and I would go downtown to stare shyly at the sailors, the tattoo parlors, the whores and trannies. They call that slumming, I know. But we were just looking for color, movement.”

In time, Armantrout and Korkegian, who met at San Diego State, took part in the burgeoning counterculture, living in communal situations and sampling mind-expanding drugs, including LSD. “I was a bad hippie,” she recalls with a smile. “I tried, for a while, but it didn’t take. I didn’t like tie-dyed T-shirts or baking. I tried to string beads but found it extremely boring. I’d read Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception [about his experimentation with mescaline], and was more interested in drugs than beads. I was interested in ways you could see the world differently. I had the realization that everyone has who takes acid—and this is so boring!—that your ego is not that important, and that ambition is not so important, and that love is important. Of course I forgot it later.” She laughs. “No enlightenment lasts. Whatever enlightenments we have fade away, to be replaced by other enlightenments.”

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.