Amanda Bissonette- Armantrout Response

I can honestly say I was confused by Armantrout. I remembered the first poem we read by Armantrout, and I was nervous to read more because I had a hard time with that first poem. It took a lot of time and careful reading for me to find any kind of point in her work. The poems seemed to have a flow of ideas, and then there would be one stanza that didn’t fit into what I thought originally and it made me rethink everything and change my notes. Versed was definitely a challenge for me but I enjoyed reading something different than I was used to. I wasn’t exactly 100% positive with my interpretations but I did a close reading of Take-Out and I think I did a good job figuring out what she meant by the poem.

At first, from the title, I knew it would have something to do with food. Then I read the first line, “The feeling of emptiness is a pre-existing condition” (Armantrout, 105), and I thought, wow, that is depressing. The word “jargon” means a specialist language which is usually understood between members of a specific group, and then I read “forces intimacy” (Armantrout, 105). To me, this meant that jargon allows people to feel a connection, but I was confused by the word “forces”, I would assume that the connection that jargon makes would be something good. As I read on, I realized that this must be describing someone that is sick or in the hospital, and that the jargon is between the patient and a doctor. That word, “forces”, told me that the connection the jargon made was unwanted and sad. No one really wants to be in that type of relationship.

One of the things I tried to do with this poem is make all three separate section flow into one another because one of the things I noticed about Armantrout is that while reading, you will come to a part of the poem that doesn’t seem to fit the idea of the entire poem. I decided to look at this poem as the stages of cancer treatment. The first stanza is the stage where the patient finds out that they are sick, there is the start of the relationship between the doctor and patient, and the start of their treatment. The second stanza describes the burger lounge, and I thought that maybe it was supposed to flow into the third stanza. The third could be while the patient is in the hospital and a friend of family member could be bringing them take-out. Also in the third stanza, the patient is realizing that their friends and family do not want to talk about their treatment or what is going on because it is unpleasant, “If the patient cannot spin background radiation into context-sick room, white cube, black box. My remarks are taken out of it” (Armantrout, 105-106). Usually illness is not something people like to talk about, so the patient is feeling alone because they cannot talk about it with anyone but the doctor.