I initially misread the title of Rae Armantrout’s new collection as “Party,” then opened the book to these lines: “Wait, I haven’t found / the right word yet.” These fortuities seemed too pat, and I wondered if Armantrout, often associated with Language writing, had somehow rigged my nervous system. For nearly 40 years she has made a poetics of not finding the right words — of finding, in fact, the “wrong” ones.
“Partly” selects poems from six books published since 2001 and adds 32 new poems. It thus constitutes a companion volume to her previous selected edition, “Veil,” published in 2001.
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A rough genealogy of Armantrout’s work would place her among Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, and Robert Creeley — brief lines, clipped lyricism, disjunctive coding, what Lyn Hejinian called “the endless radiating of denotation into relation.” But she has developed a sensibility instantly recognizable as her own:
I was just going to click
on “Phoebe is changed
into a mermaid
tomorrow!” when suddenly
it all changed
into the image
of a Citizen watch.
Armantrout restores the strangeness of experiences we take for granted. “America doesn’t want to hear you / think about tacos,” she’ll write, or “It’s because our senses / are so poor that, // on CSI, / the investigators / stand stock-still.” She twigs the now.
The scholar and critic Oren Izenberg has noted Armantrout’s “self-theorizing performance of a speaker’s always unfinished work of manifestation.” I confess I find the theory — familiar from every discussion of postmodernism ever — uninteresting in itself. And Armantrout’s verse is least compelling when most explicit:
Look how
we “attempted to express ourselves.”
Every one of these words is wrong.
It wasn’t us.
Or we made no real attempt.
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Or there is no discernible difference
between self and expression.
Far better when she creates strange messes of Oppen-bright observation:
No more bungalows
behind car-washes
painted the color of
swimming pools
—
It makes sense
to turn that corner
in a black sedan
and to write down
everything that passes.
—
Sad, fat boy in pirate hat.
Long, old, dented,
copper-colored Ford.
How many traits
must a thing have
in order to be singular?
—
Sun lights up a pelt
of dust on the receiver.
At such moments, Armantrout is herself a receiver, pinging back the too-much-with world. Her poems are dusted with what always get called “pop-culture references” — the Borg from “Star Trek,” “Superman outfits,” Clear Channel, “the Brad and Angies,” “Starbucks prayer,” and, “On how many bookstore shelves, / lovely, fanged teenagers, / red-eyed, smeared with blood.” But these are not simply plopped down, as so often in younger poets’ efforts, in an attempt to be absolument moderne. They occupy the same space and fail in the same fashion to offer assurances as “Shadows of leaves / between shadows of venetian blinds,” “prongs of ivy / mount(ing) the posts / supporting the freeway,” buds that “blacken / against blanched light.”
But the poems in “Partly” also possess a political valence that won’t be reduced to polemic, a feminism and anti-capitalism of accumulated data-points, foreclosed opportunities, omissions and slights, the often brutal operations of language. When she writes in “Advent,” a poem from 2011’s “Money Shot” (a title that resonates in several directions at once) —
Something
close to nothing
flat
from which,
fatherless,
everything has come
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— she could be describing money or credit or God or the common denominator of all three. And this is the sort of paradoxical precision that her deliberate ambiguity allows her to accomplish again and again.
Often I find myself reading a rapturous review of some acclaimed book of verse or other, only to discover, when I look up a few of the author’s poems, a style administered by clunky, artificial diction and thesaurus words. “You think this is good writing?” I mentally ask.
Mannered, fussy description that obscures more than it sees will always find favor (Wallace Stevens is the rare mannered, fussy describer who sees with a plain sense of things). In her work of description and selection, Armantrout, like a very few other contemporary poets — Juliana Spahr, Allan Peterson, August Kleinzahler — manages to bring the world into focus at the same time that she reveals how resolutely it evades our gaze.
Michael Robbins is the author of the poetry collections “The Second Sex” and “Alien vs. Predator.”
“Partly” By Rae Armantrout, Wesleyan, 252 pages, $28