ChicagoPostmodernPoetry.Com

Poetic Profile

 

 

Rae Armantrout

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

General Questions

1)  Where did you grow up? Was poetry and writing part of that mix? 

I grew up here in San Diego. I tried to get away, but it didn’t last! My father was a lifer in the navy – a chief boatswain’s mate. I hope I’m spelling that right. When he was around fifty he retired to spend his time drinking in the living room. My mother was the manager of a candy store. She was also a fundamentalist. So there was a lot of church and Bible study in my childhood. And I tried reading the Bible on my own too – until I decided I was an atheist at the age of twelve. That didn’t go over very well.

My mother read to me when I was small and that’s probably why I became I writer. She read me Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, Robin Hood, Peter Pan.  There was also a Childcraft volume of poetry we read that happened to have some Dickinson along with the Frost and Sandburg.

My kindergarten teacher started me writing poems. She had her students make up poems for a class booklet.  Mine went “The little fish swim/around and around/and away.”  I guess I wanted to get away! I kept writing poems, on and off, throughout my childhood, but, after I left kindergarten, I didn’t tell anyone about it. It seemed like a dirty secret. I remember piling books all around my paper in study hall so no one could see what I was doing. I didn’t meet another poet until I transferred to UC Berkeley at the age of 21.

 

2) Who were your poetic influences, favorite poets, writers, artwork, other things that inform your work?

When I was in 7th grade, I got hold of the Louis Untermeyer anthology of modern  American poetry. I’m not positive now what the exact title was. I studied that, I guess, for several years and found that I responded to William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson. So they were my first influences, examples of compression and intensity.

When I was around twenty, I discovered Denise Levertov. I transferred to Berkeley, where she was teaching then, and took a class with her. She got me reading Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. Ron Silliman’s first wife, Rochelle Nameroff, was in that class. Through her I met Ron. He knew a lot more about the poetry world than I did and so he became an important influence. I’m not going to attempt to mention all the many poets whose work I love. Let me just give a shout-out to Lyn Hejinian and Fanny Howe.

You ask about other things that influence my work. Well, responses to my early religious study/training/indoctrination continue to bubble up into my poetry. I also find myself returning to the fairy tales I heard as a child. And, over the last, say, fifteen years, I’ve started reading as much science as I can. I get material or “inspiration” from reading to the limit of my understanding of physics or cognitive science.  

 

3) When did you become a poet? When did poetry become a part of your everyday life?

I think I’ve already answered this really.  One answer is that I became a poet in kindergarten. Another answer is that I still don’t feel like a Poet unless I’ve just finished writing a poem.

 

4) Where were you educated? Was this important?

I started school at San Diego State College. At first I majored in anthropology. That seemed like a good way to put my life in perspective, I guess. When I was a junior, I switched to English and decided to transfer to Berkeley. I don’t really know what would have become of me if I hadn’t made that rather impulsive decision. But I’m positive we wouldn’t be having this little talk now. Later I got a graduate degree at San Francisco State.There I studied with Kathleen Fraser and Mark Linenthal who got me reading George Oppen and, later, Lorine Niedecker. But it was living in the Bay Area for around 10 years that was the real education. By the late 70’s, I was engaged in a very intense poetry  community that included Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten, Carla Harryman, Bob Perelman Bob Grenier, Kit Robinson, Leslie Scalapino, Steve Benson, and Alan Bernheimer, among others.

 

5) Many of the writers of your generation are now reaching more seasoned ages.  Do you see any younger poets who are picking up the ball and doing things new?

Seasoned?  What a complicated question! I don’t even want to approach the question of whether there’s anything new under the sun. But I will talk about some young(er) writers

(younger than I am anyway) whose work has excited me lately. It’s a pretty eclectic list!

I don’t know what that means about my taste. Recently, I’ve been blown away by Graham Foust. His books As In Every Deafness and Leave the Room to Itself made me experience envy. (Nasty feeling.) Lisa Robertson’s books The Weather and Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture left me similarly amazed.  

It’s a different experience, though, because Lisa’s almost Baroque style is so different from my own. I think Catherine Wagner’s new book, Macular Hole is really strong and brave. And I was particularly taken with Apprehend by Elizabeth Robinson. Peter Gizzi’s new book, Some Values of Landscape and Weather, is also very impressive.

That’s not an exhaustive list of younger poets whose work I’ve responded to. But those  books (for a variety of reasons) gave me pause.

 

6)  What’s your favorite food?

Do I have to choose?  I can narrow it down to coffee, coca-cola, and chocolate. Will that do?

 

7)  Sports Team?

No.

 

8) Vacation Spot?

Do I have to choose?  I’m very bad at choosing. Seattle, where my son is. Vancouver because it’s beautiful. New York. Paris. I’m going to Hawaii for the first time this summer! The desert near Borrego Springs.  See how I am?

 

9)  Curse Word? 

You can’t ask me that.  “No Way!”  “Unbelievable!”

 

10) As a woman and an avant garde writer, do you think that political agendas and art can co-exist?  Are they totally the same thing? 

What a complicated question!  I’ll proceed backwards. If they were totally the same thing, Carl Rove would be an artist. So, no, they’re not the same thing. The word “agenda” may be what troubles me. Politics can and does inhere in art. But agendas and art don’t mix well.

I do see my poetry as sometimes (or even often) political. This is not because I set out to express a political opinion, however. It’s because my immediate experience of the world enters into my work and the world is socially and politically constructed. The psyche itself is divided and therefore political.   I’m interested in exploring the operations of ideology in our lives. Growing up female may have made me sensitive to ideological manipulation early on. For instance, when I was in kindergarten, I wanted to play with the tinker toys instead of the dolls. But I was somehow led to believe that girls “didn’t” play with tinker toys. It wasn’t so much that they shouldn’t or couldn’t, it was simply a “natural fact” that they didn’t. So I didn’t.  That’s ideology. Of course, it’s everywhere. 

 

Craft Questions 

1)  How do you form a poem?  

I collect scraps: overheard phrases, sights, snippets of dreams thoughts, billboard ads, etc. I write things down in a blank book I carry in my purse. ( Usually, these are things that bother me somehow or things I don’t quite understand.) I do this over the course of a week or two and then I start to scan the parts, looking for resonances, seeing what belongs to what. Often it’s just a tone I can follow somehow.   

 

2) Do you always use images from pop culture, music and other outside stimuli? 

Well, that depends on how you define “outside.” I always start from sudden or unplanned stimuli, but, as I said, these could come from dreams. Are dreams on the inside or the outside? They’re on the inside of the mind but the outside of the conscious ego, right?

I use what “pops up” or “pops out.” Sometimes that will come from” pop culture.” Pop culture interests me because of its close (or maybe just obvious) relation to ideology. But I make use of whatever I find. It could just as well be Scientific American as television.

 

3) Is poetry an organic or synthetic process for you?

Hmm. I’m not sure exactly what you mean here. Are you asking whether it’s natural or unnatural? Deliberate or spontaneous? I might say that the organic world depends on synthesis. But now I’m just being difficult, I guess.

OK. I’ll start again. I guess it’s both. Things strike me spontaneously (organically?), but I piece them together into poems (synthesize them) deliberately.  

 

4) Where do you write? Is ambience important? Do you have rituals or habits when you write?  

I don’t write at a computer.  I write as I go about my life. I jot things down in the living room as I have my morning coffee. I write things down in cafes. I’ve even been known to pull to the side of a road to write something down. I need to be surrounded by a variety of stimuli in order to write. I was invited to a writer’s colony once – but I was afraid I’d just end up jotting something like “Tree. Tree. Squirrel. Tree.” if I went there.

When I think I have the start of a poem, I read it over first thing in the morning. That’s when I can really hear it. I revise on the computer. I’ll send it by email to a couple of friends before I publish. Test the waters. Often these friends will disagree. Sometimes they won’t say anything much. But I do it anyway. I guess that means it’s a ritual.   

 

5) In the balance between found language and created language, where does your work fall?  Do you use many sources?

I do use sources.  But usually the source will just trigger the poem. There will be one or two lines taken from the source (or from a couple of sources). The rest will be mine.  Sometimes I deliberately practice perverse paraphrase of a source such as the Bible or a scientific article. Rarely are there long quotes. Once in awhile I’ve quoted overheard speech at some length. For instance, the first part of the poem called “The Cell Phone At Your Ear May Not Exist” (from Up to Speed) is the quoted speech of a man at an outdoor cafe who may or may not have been insane.