In her Lit Hub interview, published yesterday, Armantrout tosses out this insight, at once casual and quietly sublime:
I like the idea that we can make new, provisional entities out of whatever the world throws at us. I think that’s how we create our personalities—and it’s how I write poems.
Readers of Armantrout’s poetry have come to know that her challenge to language is absolute, strange-making and all-encompassing. To make “new, provisional entities out of whatever the world throws at us” means assuming there is no inherent, stable, clear “us” beforehand. It also means that underneath the placid agreeability of her creative stance is that terrifying sense that we are always beginning, always oriented toward the future, whether in selves or in poems, certainly in whatever sense may (or may not) come between them. In this beautiful sampling of five new poems, the stanzas are a testament to her sense of poetry as particles, burrs, pebbled ruins. They bespeak a reality that the reader is about to witness in its most fierce dissolution: at the atomic level of syllable, meme, stray phrase or hackneyed vernacularism. Or witness, perhaps, through the poet’s incipient rub and scratch of modest exteriors, in these slim lines and short poems, the origins for a new house of being. That’s what I love most about Armantrout’s poetry—its modesty as sublimity, its uncertainty principle as ultimate generosity. However “alien” you find it, you have to admit, it’s pretty damn majestic.
—Adam Fitzgerald, Poetry Editor
NEAR
It’s hopeless.
The aliens don’t get
our humor.
How to wear
“Duck Dynasty”
as part
of a body
of knowledge.
*
In our world
the past’s a joke
because we laugh at
what scares us,
those zombie decades
extant
with all feeling
sucked out of them.
Our unthinkable
thoughts
recorded
on their quaint devices.
The present exists
so long
as we wink
at its near
unthinkability.
Is it like that
where you are?
HENCE
Sculpted minarets
of clouds gone
hence – or thence?
No dreams
are that well formed.
*
No one can depict
the absolute bracelets
of the orbits
touched upon
by electrons
as feeling dithers
between words
BOREAL
“Fairy dust,” she said
and cried.
“Fairy dust” as if
for the night sky
to be green
phosphorescent sheets
was at last
what she needed
so that words
had meaning.
For this we shoved
a ball
back at mother,
for this ran off,
arms out,
across a field
DISPOSAL
Let’s just say
“rather than using
energy to replicate,
complex carbons
use replication
to dissipate
excess energy.”
*
How is energy “excessive”?
*
At current levels
of efficiency
we need only
the story
of the story.
In the end
Lucy and Mimi
bury a new box
knowing that now
they will always
THE TRICK
My brain tricked me
into sleeping.
My body tricked me
into waking up.
“What do you do?”
I trick children
into writing down their thoughts.
*
Pre-owned, lightly
excoriated subject
position available.
*
You don’t have it
unless you can get it
down
and outside in
some kind of
box?
