I often find poetry like Armantrout's to be frustratingly pretentious. References are withheld and the language makes the poems cumbersome and inaccessible. For a big part of the book, I felt as though I was reading poetry made with magnets on a refrigerator that had inadvertently won a Pulitzer. I was somewhat angry because a lot of the poetry felt accidental. Armantrout's work was almost like the kind of art you see at the MoMA: a blank sheet with an orange line through it, maybe. The same kind of art that, if you were to do it, might get put in the garbage, nevermind the MoMA. I was relying on the fact that Armantrout is a well-established poet who had won a Pulitzer to appreciate the significance of her poetry. At least with Levis' poetry, sentences were complete and grammatical, poems filled the pages, and obscure references could be easily cleared up with a quick detour to Wikipedia.
I was somewhat dismayed.
I figured if these poems weren't going to be accessible to me, I had to make them accessible. On the third assigned reading for this book, I spent more time with the poems (even though they are pretty short) tearing them apart and finding out what made them tick. I was not about to let this book win. (Although, it winning would've sent it at high velocity toward the opposite wall. A win-win, perhaps.) Upon doing this (not throwing it against the wall), I found that these poems had about as much internal material as a Levis poem, you just have to spend some time with them. And another thing that I found most intriguing was that the shortest poems had the most stuff in them.
Take, for example, the poem Hey on page 92. I didn't think I'd be able to, but I amassed a veritable treasure-trove of hidden meaning out of this 22-word poem (just about enough to equal twelve times its length). I spent just as much time on this one as I would have a longer Levis poem. I found that I was able to appreciate the poetry much more if I were to just tear them apart; I enjoyed where they took me once I did that.
Take the line "A receipt" in Hey, for example. It creates the imagery of a paper receipt caught in an updraft flying through a parking lot. A fleeting image that kind of looks like a moth. Then apply that to what was said at the beginning of the poem about sound being directed toward a person. The reader can now visualize the receipt of a sound as that transitory, skittering scrap of paper.
Armantrout's poetry is filled with meaning-- I daresay more than that of Levis. It is carefully thought out and, in the wrong eyes, can look surprisingly accidental.
I can easily sympathize with the frustration at attempting to read Armantrout's work. In the beginning, I also felt that Armantrout was trying to personally frustrate me with cryptic language and incongruent images. I started feeling like the whole work was meaningless, purposely arranged as a joke on the literary world. Eventually, I gave up on trying to read really deeply and analytically about the pieces and started taking all the images on an emotional level. With that said, "Hey" is one of my favorite pieces here. It spoke to me of the hidden significance of small, overlooked, commonplace incidents. Here, it was the fluttering of a receipt--a sound that may be "addressed" to you (as if something were trying to reach out to you, catch your attention)...or it may not. This little poem, once I thought about it this way, seemed to open up to a whole world of coincidence vs fate...something like the whole, "if I hadn't stopped/kept going/sat down/stood up/listened/etc. at that particular moment" argument.
ReplyDeleteOccasionally, I second guess myself and wonder if I'm reading too far into some of these pieces...but i love focusing on the detail of the language and the quality of each line and gaining meaning from it.