[Note: This review is the second in a series. For the first, see here. For the third, see here.]

Rae Armantrout, Versed

For decades the con­fes­sional poem has been attacked by crit­ics who find it intol­er­a­bly naïve, suf­fo­cat­ing, and lim­it­ing, the seal stamped by the signet of bour­geois values. John Updike, in a moment of inten­tional self-​parody, cap­tured per­fectly the voice these crit­ics hear: “Of noth­ing but me, me / —all wrong, all wrong— / as I cringe in the face of glory / I sing, lack­ing another song.”

By now, of course, the inter­net has made con­fes­sion­al­ists of us all, and even the most strin­gent crit­ics of the mode have shown reserves of com­pla­cency that could shame whole sub­urbs. But there was a time when crit­i­cism of con­fes­sional poetry had real teeth. When Charles Bern­stein went after it in a 1980 essay, he argued that the moves had become too well known and the forms too much imi­tated, with the result that even the stark­est of per­sonal rev­e­la­tions ended up sound­ing phony:

Using var­i­ous ‘taboo’ con­tents can read at this point as only a lit­er­ary device to give the sem­blance of inti­macy and authenticity…. It’s not that one doesn’t believe the con­fes­sions of the pri­vate life to be true, but that such con­fes­sions take on a style and con­tent largely pre­dictable, largely, in a sense, already ‘publicized.’

One pos­si­ble anti­dote to confessionalism’s pre­dictabil­ity, Bern­stein sug­gested, was a kind of poetry that took med­i­ta­tion as its model, a poetry in which “the mind think­ing becomes the active force of the poem,” where “the music and rhythm of con­tem­pla­tion become the form of the life, a life, as it is being lived in a body.” Bern­stein was talk­ing about poets like Ted Green­wald, David Antin, and the Robert Cree­ley of Pieces and Words, but the poet who has turned his pre­scrip­tion to most impres­sive effect over the last three decades is Rae Armantrout.

Through much of her career, Armantrout’s poetic med­i­ta­tions eschewed first-​person pro­nouns as much as pos­si­ble, let­ting them in only when nec­es­sary to dress them down. “DUSK,” a fine little poem from her first book, cap­tures the spirit well:

spider on the cold expanse
of glass, three sto­ries high
rests intently
and so purely alone.

I’m not like that!

Since the 2000 pub­li­ca­tion of The Pre­text, how­ever, Armantrout has been bend­ing her focus ever more inward. While she’s still sus­pi­cious of the self and its pre­sump­tions, lately she seems more will­ing to ven­ture some pos­i­tive knowl­edge about the self. Com­pare “DUSK,” above, to the last three sec­tions of “Presto,” a poem from her new book Versed:

“What do you want
to be?”

Skele­ton suits
and Super­man out­fits —

inap­pro­pri­ate touch­ing
on drug­store racks.

*

Presto!

Pairs of flies
re-​tie

the old knot
mid-​air.

*

Blonde wigs and
wizard caps.

“I want to go back!”

Invis­i­ble knot.

I want to be that!

For Armantrout, the riddle of ontol­ogy, and the self’s rela­tion to it, has a spe­cial urgency: she has kidney adren­a­l­cor­ti­cal cancer. Unlike Paul Guest, Armantrout rarely puts her ill­ness square in our sights, but it exerts a steady pull nev­er­the­less, spread­ing across the backs of her poems like a tain that turns even innocent-​sounding phrases into mir­rors of mor­tal­ity. “Dark matter,” the title of a poem and the second half of the book, is a term bor­rowed from astro­physics; “Hey / my avatar’s not work­ing!” is a scrap over­heard at an inter­net café; “But the part is sick / of rep­re­sent­ing the whole” is a joke about metonymy. All of these, how­ever, become some­thing much more sin­is­ter in the shadow of her cancer.

As in ear­lier work, in Versed Armantrout is deter­mined to make form mimic mental func­tion. She chops and stacks her lines to sug­gest the rhythm of thought and uses em-​dashes to signal mental stut­ters. Voices from the out­side world—an over­heard con­ver­sa­tion here, a snip­pet of Starbuck’s sound­track there—enter through quo­ta­tion marks and add to the impres­sion of immediacy.

Armantrout’s suc­cess in this style is all the more sig­nif­i­cant because today the med­i­ta­tive mode wears the mantle of the “largely pre­dictable, largely… ‘pub­li­cized’” that Bern­stein pinned on con­fes­sion­al­ism thirty years ago. Ama­teur cog­ni­tive the­o­rists are every­where in con­tem­po­rary poetry, and most of them are spout­ing the same cog­ni­tions and the same the­o­ries. Armantrout isn’t entirely immune to this charge—every once in a while she’ll write some­thing that sounds like an MFA stu­dent high on Wittgen­stein for the first time—but her quirky good humor usu­ally spares her poems the smell of the sem­i­nar room:

Look — I’m coop­er­at­ing!
I can pull myself apart
and still speak.
—From “Inscription”

Versed is a good book by a very good poet. But while I con­cede it’s obnox­ious for a reviewer to judge a book against some imag­i­nary ver­sion of it he holds in his head, I can’t help but think this book might have been better had Armantrout more reg­u­larly indulged her lyric gifts. In any other case it would be absurd to ask a Lan­guage poet for more lyricism—might as well ask them for a dona­tion to the World Bank—but Armantrout has never been a “normal” Lan­guage poet. (Even Ron Sil­li­man, in his intro­duc­tion to Veil, Armantrout’s 2001 new and selected, argued that it was “pointless…to iden­tify [her work] as an instance of lan­guage writ­ing.”) The first half of “Plea­sure” shows the skill with which she can deploy a lyric flour­ish when the mood strikes her:

A sleight-of-hand
equilibrium

being pro­duced
as bees

pass one another,

a tick­lish rumble
shut­tling between blooms.

I’d like to think
I’m one,

no,
all of them.

There are sev­eral things to admire here: the extended metaphor, which brings down to earth the apiary image Dante used to describe the divine mind; the final four lines, which mimic the recur­sive­ness (“I’d like to think”) and mis­di­rec­tions (“I’m one, / no, / all of them”) of our think­ing; or the deploy­ment of the con­trac­tion I’m, one of Armantrout’s favorite tricks, which yokes the per­sonal and objec­tive selves under the strap of a single apos­tro­phe. For my money, how­ever, none of these qual­i­ties come close to that “tick­lish rumble / shut­tling between blooms,” a phrase that affords all three of the plea­sures Louis Zukof­sky com­mended in poetry: sight, sound, and intel­lec­tion. And so, while I cer­tainly don’t wish that all the poetry in Versed were like those lines—in fact I sus­pect they work as well as they do because of the aus­ter­ity that sur­rounds them—I do wish a little more of it were.

+++

Dis­clo­sure: Some of the poems in Versed were pub­lished in Chicago Review while I was on the mast­head, but I didn’t play a part in their selection.