Rae Armantrout: California Poets Part 1, Three Poems

Rae Armantrout

August 27th, 2020

California Poets: Part I

Rae Armantrout

Three Poems

Fox

To cover the material,

“trace the historic path

of a doomed train

line.”

*

To identify

as

a cloth fox

puppet.

*

To see your way

into

a circle of six blue flowers

beneath an indigo plateau

itself composed

of tiny blossoms –

the “hydrangea.”

*

To be named.

Some deranged water

Reliable Sources

Don’t mention the universe—

that web of signals

about what?

Each shilling for

its own prospective

source.

An endless wrangling

that passes for matter.

I miss shadows

under motley pebbles,

discreet

and equivalent

as the days are

long

Running the Numbers

One

comes to a point,

a nib,

and from there

to nibble

and that obscene word,

“niblet.”

*

All that there was

to say

said

and said again:

the long list

of new absences.

*

My dreams are now half

terror,

half spoof;

half fever sweat,

half “Swamp

all new

tonight at 10:00.”

Interview

July 29th, 2026

California Poets Interview Series:

Rae Armantrout, Poet, Professor

interviewed by David Garyan

DG: I’d like to start with your early life which had its fair share of difficulties. You’ve talked about how discovering science helped, in some way, to break out of the conservative environment you were growing up in. To what extent do you see the creative discipline of poetry as also a scientific one, given that language poetry is both an art form and in many ways a laboratory of language where meaning and ideas are tested against a subject—that being the reader?

RA: I had never looked at it that way but, yes,. In both science and poetry, you see how far you can take a premise or hypothesis—how far you can run with it before you run aground, as it were. My poems often start (for me at least) with a question, with curiosity. Sometimes it’s just a question like why does X remind me of Y?  Sometimes it’s “If X is true, what does that imply?  My poem “Making” in Wobble, is an example of this. It starts:

“What made this happen?”

you ask every time

as if compulsion itself

were mandatory,

the way light travels

at the speed of light

“because it must”

The “you “in the second line is first of all me, then it’s an imaginary scientist, then it’s the reader. I think we have all asked what made something happen as it did. This question implies that nothing happens unless it has to, unless it’s forced. That may well be true.  If it’s true, what does that imply about nature? On the other hand, what if it isn’t true but we all act as if it were? I think both poetry and science require us to examine our terms and question our presumptions. That’s how I approach it anyway.

DG: Continuing on the topic of science, you have described your interest in beginnings and endings, in relation to the world we live in and the vast cosmos in which that life is situated. I’d like to use this macrocosm in relation to the microcosm of your writing approach. Ending a poem—but really doing it well—is probably the most challenging task for a poet, perhaps second only to starting one. How would you describe your composition process from beginning to end, and to what extent has it changed over the years? Have you seen a greater tendency to let the spontaneity of any given piece drive the direction of a work, or has greater experience caused the emergence of an overarching method that brings order and congruity to the whole endeavor?

RA: I talked above about how my poems begin.  You’re right that deciding when and how to end a poem is tricky. The most common thing I do to revise is take out what I thought, at first, was going to be the end. I like poems to be somehow open-ended, to leave the reader wondering—as I continue to do. I might end almost mid-thought or I might end with a sort of aphorism that sounds true or at least plausible at first and then, on second thought, raises suspicions or questions. I don’t think my work has changed radically since I started. I did figure out that I could look at things from different angles by dividing the poem into separate sections. I think any good poem moves with spontaneity, that is, you start out with a scrap of an idea, but once you’re in it you let one word or statement suggest the next and so on.

DG: Authors such as Lyn Hejinian have identified the so-called double-bind, a key aspect of your work that concerns itself with the dichotomy between the world that’s being seen and the person doing the seeing. This brings further scientific qualities to your writing, in particular the observer effect. Could you elaborate a bit more about this in relation to poetry, mainly whether the ambiguous nature of language makes the difference between our vision and how we want to describe it always a problematic one?

RA: We know that our sensorium is limited. Insects see colors we can’t see; dogs smell things we can’t smell. It’s also true that we tend to see what we expect to see and not what we don’t. I could go on. The point is we only have access to one slice of reality. You can never describe an object completely, so what do you include and what are you leaving out? So, yes, the difference between perception and reality (whatever that may be) is a serious philosophical problem that affects any effort to describe the world. That doesn’t bother me; It interests me. It seems there’s no self without the world and there’s no world without self.

DG: You have described how Language Poetry, in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s was instrumental in moving American verse from a highly personal, confessional framework to a broader more interdisciplinary art form. We’re now in an age where not only language, but society itself has never been more interconnected yet strangely so unsure of the truth—so unaware of how to find it amongst propaganda and lies. What role do you see poetry having in the near future and are there perhaps movements you can see now which are trying to subvert how not only disinformation, but information as a whole is created?

RA: The advent of AI Large Language models was so sudden and pervasive that I think it has stunned everyone. Remember when Barthes and Foucault proclaimed that “the author is dead” and every English department in America quoted them? Well, now the author may actually be dead and I think we’re feeling pretty unhappy about that. But the way those 20th century philosophers encouraged us to look closely at language is still relevant. Maybe it’s more relevant than ever at a time when machines can produce propaganda and slop, both linguistic and visual, in the blink of an eye. It turns out we do want to search for the truth even while we acknowledge the difficulty of ever finding it. That takes active reading.

I don’t really know if there are any new literary movements arising out of our current situation. The government has taken an absurdist turn while hurting people here and around the world. The absurdity seems ripe for satire, but that’s too easy. Irony falls flat. I try to deal with this sometimes in my work—or instance in the poem “America” in my new book Safe Rooms—so I know how hard it is. I’m seldom satisfied with the results. There may well be movements afoot that I don’t know about, but I suspect most of us are still trying to figure out what world we’re in now. I’m eager to hear other people’s ideas about this.

DG: I’d like to transition and talk about the fruitful teaching career you had at UC San Diego, where you worked for over twenty years. Teaching is a labor of love and there are certainly rewarding aspects but also difficult ones no matter how enjoyable the process is. Could you speak a bit about how you structured your classes and how that influenced your writing?

RA: I think the first thing we need to do  is convince beginning writers that they need to read; show them  things we think they’ll respond to  and which they might not have found on their own. My classes always started with discussing assigned poems before we talked about student work. I like to encourage not only a tolerance for ambiguity but an appreciation of it. I also like to encourage students to look outward as much as inward, to pay attention to what’s going on around them. Sometimes I would tell them to go sit outside the classroom, which was often surrounded by eucalyptus trees and benches, with a notebook and no cell phone and write down what they observed. That was hard for them. Or I’d bring an ordinary object, sometimes a pink grade school eraser, into class and have them all write about it. I used Francis Ponge’s poems as an introduction to that exercise. That one went well, I think.

DG: Having myself once moved from California to Washington State, I can definitely understand the changes in scenery. The environment has often been at the forefront of your work, but there is always something distinctly Californian about it. The idea that we never truly know the place we inhabit—at least fully—until we look at it from another, preferably distant place resonates strongly for me. Do you find there’s a difference in how you write about California now, from a distance, as opposed to when you were living there?

RA: My writing tends to be mostly oriented toward the present. I only write about California now when I visit it—which I do from time to time. There are certainly times when I miss the San Diego light, and the wide vistas you can see with just a little elevation, and the wildness of the ocean. In winter I think, if I were in California, I would still be surrounded by leaves and flowers. On the other hand, I love the trees here—especially the big deciduous trees, the maples, birches, and oaks. It’s gorgeous when they turn color in the fall but ominous too because you know that what people here call “the big dark” is coming.

DG: Your 2024 collection, Go Figure, pulls no punches when it comes to addressing the environmental, social, and political problems of our day. Yet there is a solemn beauty to the pieces—urgent but measured, honest but never confrontational. I’m always fascinated by the trajectory a poet’s career has taken with respect when their first and last book is compared. It would seem, at least it does so for me, that Go Figure is in many ways the attainment of perfection in relation to Extremities, rather than a complete one-eighty from the latter book, which you wrote in 1978. Do you see it the same way or are these connections, in your view, much more tenuous at this point in time?

RA: Thanks for your kind words. I agree that my work is a continuum, not a 180. The poem “Extremities” which leads off that book, is about being fascinated by edges—beginnings and endings. I’m still fascinated by those things. A critic commented that the poem treats the human aspect of endings, in particular, rather cavalierly. I was 25 when I wrote it. I still like the poem but I wouldn’t write it now. 

DG: I’m fascinated with your ideas about metaphor, which is a poetic tool you employ, but it’s not one you necessarily trust, given your belief that it is intrinsically deceptive. Could you elaborate a bit more about why you feel this way and if there might also be some positive aspects related to that aforementioned deception?

RA: I think my view of metaphor is more complicated than that. I know what you’re referring to. I think my ideas have evolved some since then, though my poems haven’t necessarily changed. Now I’d say that metaphor is ubiquitous and inevitable. So the question isn’t whether you’ll use metaphor, but how. When I was younger, I was reacting against the over-reliance on simile which had become a tic in the mainstream poetry of the day. What I am suspicious of is the way that, whether in simile or metaphor, there’s the thing you’re really, talking about (the tenor) and then there is the image you use to characterize it (the vehicle). It's an inherently unequal relationship. The “vehicle” is, well, a vehicle. It gets all the development, but the point is to relate it back to what the poet is really talking about.   I’m not the first poet to question the structure of metaphor. In the Shakespeare sonnet beginning, “Shall I compare thee to a summer day?” the short answer is ‘no.’  Of course, there are metaphors in my poems. It’s just that they tend to be unstable. The beginning of “Bang” in Go Figure” is an example of that. I’m writing, at least in the opening, about the “big bang.” It goes:

“Bang” is a metaphor

as is “explode.”

We might as well say,

“exponential growth.”

Really what can you compare to an unobservable event sometimes known as “the singularity”? All the descriptive terms are in quotes. And they all have different tonal registers. Exponential growth suggests either finance or disease. “Bang” is first and foremost the sound a gun makes, then maybe it suggests fireworks or the popping of a balloon. The metaphors in this poem are really metaphors for the problem of how to describe the indescribable.

DG: Your poetry has a very powerful way of creating both assertion and doubt at the same time. This is achieved by crafting stanzas which are both connected to each other just enough to create a unified poem; at the same time the stanzas themselves function like independent units—individual pieces in their own right. By employing this strategy, you achieve a high degree of interpretability in your work. To what extent do you rewrite stanzas when something looks either too opaque or too clear, and more generally, can a reader ever have an “incorrect” explication of a poem?

RA: Yes to the last question. None of my poems is a treasure map showing the location of pirate gold, for instance. My point is that a reader has to pay close attention to the actual words on the page when reading a poem. It’s true that I like a poem to run on parallel sets of tracks but, to continue with the metaphor, that doesn’t mean it should run off the rails and overturn. Well, that metaphor isn’t quite right. There can be multiple meanings at play in a poem and, in some poems, meaning isn’t necessarily important. I just get irked when people (often students) think that licenses a free-for-all. I’d like my ideal reader to pay attention to the field of meaning around each word.   For instance, a reader may well not associate the opening lines from “Bang” with the big bang until they reach the following lines which are

Hydrogen filaments

extending

between clumps

of dark matter,

stars forming at the nodes.

At that point, a reader should be getting an idea about the reference retroactively. I hope they see that the opening lines also deal with cosmology. They aren’t about the trinity or the sinking of the Titanic. I’m being silly, but you see what mean.

I don’t want people to think I always and only write about cosmology though. That is totally not true. Even “Bang,” which begins with cosmology, takes a sudden turn and ends with me playing with my granddaughters and pretending to feed Styrofoam popcorn to a wooden dinosaur. I bet you wonder how we got there. Well, it involves “ … a fall/from higher to lower//degrees/of symmetry.” A rather drastic fall, in fact. There is very little symmetry in the play space with the Styrofoam popcorn. I enjoy bringing things from different linguistic realms together.

DG: Though your work has been firmly rooted in the Language Poetry school, there are also elements of lyricism in much of it. Do you feel that with the emergence of different poetry movements we’re creating, at least at times, unnecessary distinctions in language where perhaps they don’t even exist?

RA: I think language poets opened up or rather reopened what could be included in a poem. After Pound, Moore, and Reznikoff there was a retrenchment. The same thing was starting to happen after Ashbery, O’Hara, and Ginsberg. The scope of poetry was narrowing to personal anecdote. The language poets fought against that tendency. This isn’t a very nuanced account; it’s way over-general, but there’s also truth in it. As for the lyric, there have always been lyric tendencies in some of the writers associated with language poetry, depending, of course on what you think defines lyric. That’s another can of worms. I think my work has elements of language poetry and elements of lyric.

DG: What is a book you’ve recently read that has impacted you?

RA: I’m reading Lisa Robertson’s second novel, riverwork. It’s really great.

DG: What are you working on at the moment?

RA: Safe Rooms is going to be out any minute. Another manuscript called The Know will be published by Wesleyan in 2028. Now I’m working on a collection which is so far untitled. After that, the abyss. Who knows?

Author Bio:

Rae Armantrout is the author of fourteen books of poems, including Wobble (2018), a finalist for the National Book Award, Partly, New and Selected Poems (2016), and Versed (2009) which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2010. Her work appears in many journals and anthologies. She is professor emerita from UC San Diego and currently lives in the Seattle area. A new book, Conjure, will be published by Wesleyan in October.