Benjamin's Response to Armantrout

Benjamin Gadberry
Armantrout Blog Post


What a relief from Levis! Though at the beginning of the semester (after only reading Versed) I was a bit concerned with Armantrout, now that I have read her whole collection I will remember it with fond memories. Armantrout, like reading Merwin, was fun for the fact that it could be read in two ways: a) simply for enjoyment, b) for deep thinking/analyzing. And not necessarily in that order.
When it comes to sheer and seeming randomness in poetry, Armantrout definitely takes the cake. Armantrout breaks her poems up into sections designated by numbers, and often it seems that each section takes wildly different directions with no relation to the following or previous sections. However, the deeper we dig (some poems are more of a stretch than others) we can find connections between even the most bizarre combinations.
Example. In Equals, we have:


1.

As if, after all, the thing that comes to mind
squared
times inertia
equaled the “real”


2.

One lizard jammed headfirst
down the throat
of a second


At first this was like any Armantrout poem with two (or three) conflicting sections. Perhaps she’d give us two sections that seemed fairly straightforward before throwing us a total screw ball.
However, one of Armantrout’s standard techniques in Versed is to make connections between sections in her poems, however obscure, and sit back and (I would think) laugh at us readers and see if we can figure it out.
A good search of “squared times inertia” led me to the “mass moment of inertia,” a fancy physics term that describes a scalar. My high school physics is a little rusty but the basic idea behind the first and second moments of inertia is measuring an object’s resistance to bending, twisting, etc, and so forth (don’t quote me on this, however, as this is a bad generalization.)
Taking this knowledge, however, and applying it to the second section of the poem, yields us some pleasant enlightenment. “One lizard jammed headfirst down the throat of a second” is obviously going to play into the physical laws behind, oddly enough, inertia, or the “mass moment of inertia.”
What I love about Armantrout’s poems, apparent from their clever, bizarre wording and playful nature, is this encouragement to peer deeper into language, to investigate a meaning outside of the poem. While I could read this poem as someone with little knowledge of Physics and enjoy it almost for its “what the hell?” reaction, I would take equal (or perhaps more) pleasure from it as a Physics teacher. And of course as someone who is interested in discovering some meaning, I take pleasure as well knowing that at least in some way I’ve come up with some form of interpretation (thank you Google!)
One final example, from “Lasting” (abridged)

1.

Now light
sits in the chairs...
Perfect molecules of plastic
sheet the seas

2.

When I remember my mother, I remember her fears...


“Lasting” was a little easier to analyze. In the first section, we see a house with furniture that is empty, and “perfect molecules of plastic sheet the seas” sounds a lot like the plastic coverings people put over furniture in homes that are either for sale or are unoccupied for a long time.
To a greater and lesser degree then, Armantrout uses this method of seemingly disconnected fragments in her poems. In reality, the key for the reader is to be active, to actively participate the poem and not mindlessly “consume” it. Though Armantrout, like Merwin, wields a Zen like pen, her poems call on us to find the connections and make the meaning.

-Benjamin Gadberry