The Wild Iris I enjoyed reading. I enjoyed this reading so much more then any of the other readings we have had in class thus far. I could read through the poems and get a sense of imagery, and sense of feel, a sense of emotion and a sense of what the over all picture or meaning was supposed to be. I did have to look up a few words here and there and I did have to read over a few poems more then once, twice and even three times, but unlike a few of the other readings we have had, these poems actually made more sense every time I read over them. I would grasp a little more knowledge and understanding every time I read them over which was a huge relief for me, I was wondering when I was actually going to get some sort of break when it came to poems we have been reading and Louise Gluck really helped me out.
Reading through her book I felt like she has great examples of what I believe poems are. Not necessarily love poems or all sorts of rhyming, but a nice view, a nice message, a relaxing and rewarding feeling when you’re done.
Over all these poems have a lot to do with Faith, with God, with the creation of humans and the creation of Mother Nature specifically plants. These seem to be a lot to do with health, death, and birth. Louise tends to question her belief in God or a higher power a lot in this book, she seems to sway back in forth on where is God, does he exist, if he does why cant we see him? Something interesting she does with her poems is she gives plants a voice, a lot of poems in this book are about how plants are feeling and how plants are thinking, which makes you have to step outside of your comfort zone because we all know plants don’t talk and its very unlikely they even have the knowledge of being able to feel emotion of any sort.
One poem I really enjoyed is called “Matins” it’s the matins that’s on page 12.
This poem I believe is basically saying that she is questioning her belief in God, she is saying that its hard to believe in something that you cant see, that she knows he is around and that she is supposed to love him and praise him but how can she truly allow herself to do such a thing if she really doesn’t know if he is real. If something is real then one should be able to see it or feel it or taste it, and with God you cant do any of those things. She writes, “Forgive me if I say I love you:” “I cannot Love what I cant conceive”, “We are left to think you couldn’t possibly exist”. This is just showing how she wants to love and believe in a higher power but how can she? She is lead to believe that the only thing that somewhat shows her a God exist is a silence of a morning, or cats not yet fighting or even crickets that haven’t started rubbing their wings yet. She is looking for an answer that most everyone is in hopes to find.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Saturday, October 9, 2010
Emily Cushing's Armantrout Response
Let me begin by stating that at first I was hesitant about Armantrout's poetry. It seemed scattered and complex which was frustrating because of the lack of words. However, after our first class discussion I learned to appreciate what she writes. We spent some time in class discussion what Armantrout isn't doing in the text. I think this is an interesting approach in reading poetry. We picked apart what isn't happening such as closure, overall theme, narrative, emotion, center, etc. However I would like to argue that while some of these aspects still seem missing, there are a few that appeared to me while reading. Armantrout doesn't provide a central voice or experience and in doing so she allows the reader to construct the story and meaning themselves (as we discussed in class). This changes the reader's relationship to the meaning of the text for we have to take what we are provided and create something else. There are no windows or paths to other objects and meanings, but what is being represented on the page allows us to look at the poem and interpret it in a different way.
One poem that demonstrates this is "A Resemblance." Armantrout writes "matter is mostly/ aura?" Right away this can be read in different ways. One could take it as a question that she is asking the reader, or a definite statement. How the reader chooses to read it is their decision. A few lines down she writes "Quiet, ragged/ skirt of dust/ encircling a ceramic gourd." The first line consists of adjectives followed by an image performing an action around another object. The images are objects that would "normally" be placed together so the reader can interpret them in many ways. I picture myself sitting at a wheel making pottery. I see the skirt of dust around the ceramic gourd as an image of matter, which composes everything, surrounding our every day life in nature and objects but also making up everything that we create. However someone else could have a completely different interpretation of it and Armantrout provides no concrete evidence of what she intended it to mean.
What's interesting about the language in her poetry is that she doesn't necessarily construct her text with complex words or difficult imagery. It is more that she gives you just enough so you think you know what she is getting at, but she leaves you hanging and having to do your own work to finish the thought. In her poem titled "Hey" she writes "(1) Sound/ may be addressed/ to you/ or it may not./ (2) A receipt,/ blown crazily/ across the parking lot,/ was, perhaps,/ a moth". She clearly separates the two "stanzas" with numbers and provides no ending punctuation. Therefore the reader needs to decide whether to connect the two stanzas in meaning, or to try and create something different out of them. Was the receipt addressed to you? What is the significance of the moth? Where does sound come in? These are all questions that can appear and frustrate someone reading because there is not enough substance to create an answer. I think this is the brilliance of Armantrout. Even when the readers create their own meaning they can drive themselves crazy wondering if it's the "right" one. I thoroughly enjoyed Armantrout and think it'd be interesting to read some of her work in few months or even in a year to see how my interpretation changes.
One poem that demonstrates this is "A Resemblance." Armantrout writes "matter is mostly/ aura?" Right away this can be read in different ways. One could take it as a question that she is asking the reader, or a definite statement. How the reader chooses to read it is their decision. A few lines down she writes "Quiet, ragged/ skirt of dust/ encircling a ceramic gourd." The first line consists of adjectives followed by an image performing an action around another object. The images are objects that would "normally" be placed together so the reader can interpret them in many ways. I picture myself sitting at a wheel making pottery. I see the skirt of dust around the ceramic gourd as an image of matter, which composes everything, surrounding our every day life in nature and objects but also making up everything that we create. However someone else could have a completely different interpretation of it and Armantrout provides no concrete evidence of what she intended it to mean.
What's interesting about the language in her poetry is that she doesn't necessarily construct her text with complex words or difficult imagery. It is more that she gives you just enough so you think you know what she is getting at, but she leaves you hanging and having to do your own work to finish the thought. In her poem titled "Hey" she writes "(1) Sound/ may be addressed/ to you/ or it may not./ (2) A receipt,/ blown crazily/ across the parking lot,/ was, perhaps,/ a moth". She clearly separates the two "stanzas" with numbers and provides no ending punctuation. Therefore the reader needs to decide whether to connect the two stanzas in meaning, or to try and create something different out of them. Was the receipt addressed to you? What is the significance of the moth? Where does sound come in? These are all questions that can appear and frustrate someone reading because there is not enough substance to create an answer. I think this is the brilliance of Armantrout. Even when the readers create their own meaning they can drive themselves crazy wondering if it's the "right" one. I thoroughly enjoyed Armantrout and think it'd be interesting to read some of her work in few months or even in a year to see how my interpretation changes.
Friday, October 8, 2010
megan's response to Armantrout
Overall I felt like I understood Armantrout the best out of the poets we have read so far. There was something about her writing that allowed my mind to wander and go in so many different directions. She allows so many different interpretations for her poems. Her poetry is the most “poem-like,” meaning it’s style and flow is the most open and the least constrictive. Because of it’s “emptiness” meaning can be found. Each poem can mean something different to individuals.
Previously we discussed that Armantrout uses poems to point back to language, she develops this through her scarcity of words. Also, by not creating a clear scene or picture of what is going on, it allows the reader to explore the language itself. The reader must be actively involved in searching for meaning and understanding the truth of the meaning.
I like how she uses the truths of day-to-day stuff to show an analogy to life and language. Her belief about and use of language seems fairly clear in “a resemblance” when she mentions how “a word is mostly connotation, matter is mostly auras… look a-likes (pg 10.)” Her writing definitely appeals to the mind in an abstract way. I think that this type of poetry gives the most opportunity for interpretation and understanding of language in addition to the world itself, and what is described through the language.
Another thing I noticed was Armantrout’s focus on vanity and culture. She mentions this throughout the book both through ideals and specific pop culture references. “Outer” on page 11, she speaks about how everything is about representation rather than the real thing. She states that “to see yourself as if from the outside-though not as others see you.” This is her understanding of the world and how language can coincide with it.
Previously we discussed that Armantrout uses poems to point back to language, she develops this through her scarcity of words. Also, by not creating a clear scene or picture of what is going on, it allows the reader to explore the language itself. The reader must be actively involved in searching for meaning and understanding the truth of the meaning.
I like how she uses the truths of day-to-day stuff to show an analogy to life and language. Her belief about and use of language seems fairly clear in “a resemblance” when she mentions how “a word is mostly connotation, matter is mostly auras… look a-likes (pg 10.)” Her writing definitely appeals to the mind in an abstract way. I think that this type of poetry gives the most opportunity for interpretation and understanding of language in addition to the world itself, and what is described through the language.
Another thing I noticed was Armantrout’s focus on vanity and culture. She mentions this throughout the book both through ideals and specific pop culture references. “Outer” on page 11, she speaks about how everything is about representation rather than the real thing. She states that “to see yourself as if from the outside-though not as others see you.” This is her understanding of the world and how language can coincide with it.
Joana's response to Armantrout
I will admit that when I first read Armantrout at the beginning of the year, I had no idea what was going on in the poem. I’m not especially good at interpreting the meaning of poems that are as abstract as hers. However, as I read the book, I began to understand what Armantrout was trying to do with her poetry, even if I didn’t fully understand the meaning behind them all.
For instance, on pages 93 and 94, the poem “Integer” sees a dramatic shift in tone. First it’s talking about darkness, then about how in metaphors “it kills the look-alike.” However, in the third section, she pretty much comes out and says that the parts of the poem before that don’t matter. This goes with the fact that after she discounts metaphors, she goes back on what she said. It matches the talk about darkness, because humans and some animals can’t see that well in darkness, if at all, and so things that are seen in darkness aren’t clear.
The meanings of her poems are often left up to reader interpretation, and there can be a lot of that. Her poems are loose in their prose, in a way, because even though you could say that it’s very deep, it’s not incredibly specific. What one person would see as an obvious metaphor for something wouldn’t be obvious at all to someone else. So, in a way, her poems are shrouded in the same darkness that she talks about in Integer.
Armantrout, Versed
Acclaimed Language poet Rae Armantrout writes about death, culture, and language in her winning collection Versed. Strongly influenced by William Carlos Williams, Armantrout’s poetry is often immanent and speech-based, and requires the reader to construct meaning actively when reading her work. On my first reading of Versed, I did not fully appreciate these poems which seemed either a little too easy or inaccessible; however, it helped me a lot to look up information on the life and poetic influence of the author, which is something I remember someone in class mentioned as helpful in reading Armantrout’s work.
I appreciated and connected particularly to the poems in Versed that had personal elements to them; for example, in her poem “Own,” Armantrout explores what we can assume is a personal hospital experience, as Armantrout’s struggle with cancer is often brought to her poetry. This segmented piece jumps from stanzas of her blunt hospital surroundings, to dream sequences, to thoughts about the body. She describes herself as the “blip / floating across my own / ‘field of vision..’” (58), seeing herself from afar as if detached from her perception, as well as from her body and her slow recovery. Her eyes “closed,” she sees the “Spartan wall of the ICU / covered in a scrambled hodge-podge of sticky notes, /…snippets of reference, / madly irrelevant.” She is dreaming and awake, seeing a fantastical scene that is both starkly real and almost ridiculous in how it describes the organization of the hospital; such important information on this triumphant wall is shown as a huge meaningless mess. The doctors are also described in this way, as a “Chorus of expert voices beyond my door, forever / dissecting my case. / …‘We will prevail,’ says the leader on multiple / screens.” This warrior-type character and “Chorus” of doctors negate their professional, organized selves. Lying and listening to these doctors around her, Armantrout doesn’t buy into their positive words: “he’s become pure / being, insisting / only on insistence” (59).
In the last few stanzas of “Own,” the cancer appears in description and thought; a dream-like vision of actors gathering in an act of cancer: “A crowd (scene) of cells, growing wildly, / …Able to draw blood vessels to itself / by emitting a mock distress call.” Just as Armantrout describes her hospital surroundings as false and futile, now she is playing with the idea that cancer has a sense of humor, can play “any role you like and go on / forever.” This sense of the body as an opera house of cancer is ridiculous, just as a friend who thinks they can be a savior is ridiculous: “‘SHH!’ he says to anyone who speaks.” A patient nearby says, “‘I want / to be fine. It’s my body!’” (58), which I think is what the speaker also wants, what the actors of her cancer really want to say. Finally, I think the best line of this poem is, “Symbolism as the party face of paranoia.” This line makes me think of both the perfectly chosen words, both in connotation and in percussion; Armantrout brings the mind both to language itself and the idea of fear or paranoia having a silly, and yet colorful mask of meaningfulness. Overall, this line exemplifies what she does in her entire poem; grabs at something as big and frightening as cancer and turns it into theatrical, and yet incredible performance.
Overall, I think Armantrout’s poetry is imaginative and extremely meaningful, personal and influential.
I appreciated and connected particularly to the poems in Versed that had personal elements to them; for example, in her poem “Own,” Armantrout explores what we can assume is a personal hospital experience, as Armantrout’s struggle with cancer is often brought to her poetry. This segmented piece jumps from stanzas of her blunt hospital surroundings, to dream sequences, to thoughts about the body. She describes herself as the “blip / floating across my own / ‘field of vision..’” (58), seeing herself from afar as if detached from her perception, as well as from her body and her slow recovery. Her eyes “closed,” she sees the “Spartan wall of the ICU / covered in a scrambled hodge-podge of sticky notes, /…snippets of reference, / madly irrelevant.” She is dreaming and awake, seeing a fantastical scene that is both starkly real and almost ridiculous in how it describes the organization of the hospital; such important information on this triumphant wall is shown as a huge meaningless mess. The doctors are also described in this way, as a “Chorus of expert voices beyond my door, forever / dissecting my case. / …‘We will prevail,’ says the leader on multiple / screens.” This warrior-type character and “Chorus” of doctors negate their professional, organized selves. Lying and listening to these doctors around her, Armantrout doesn’t buy into their positive words: “he’s become pure / being, insisting / only on insistence” (59).
In the last few stanzas of “Own,” the cancer appears in description and thought; a dream-like vision of actors gathering in an act of cancer: “A crowd (scene) of cells, growing wildly, / …Able to draw blood vessels to itself / by emitting a mock distress call.” Just as Armantrout describes her hospital surroundings as false and futile, now she is playing with the idea that cancer has a sense of humor, can play “any role you like and go on / forever.” This sense of the body as an opera house of cancer is ridiculous, just as a friend who thinks they can be a savior is ridiculous: “‘SHH!’ he says to anyone who speaks.” A patient nearby says, “‘I want / to be fine. It’s my body!’” (58), which I think is what the speaker also wants, what the actors of her cancer really want to say. Finally, I think the best line of this poem is, “Symbolism as the party face of paranoia.” This line makes me think of both the perfectly chosen words, both in connotation and in percussion; Armantrout brings the mind both to language itself and the idea of fear or paranoia having a silly, and yet colorful mask of meaningfulness. Overall, this line exemplifies what she does in her entire poem; grabs at something as big and frightening as cancer and turns it into theatrical, and yet incredible performance.
Overall, I think Armantrout’s poetry is imaginative and extremely meaningful, personal and influential.
Renate's Response to Armantrout
WHOA!
When we first read Armantrout at the beginning of the semester (and even when we started to delve into her book later on) I admit, I was very unsure of my ability to close-read her poems. In fact, her kind of poetry is one of the reasons that poetry, in general, scares me. At a glance, it's just a string of words that make no sense. And why would I bother to read something like that?
I recall the list we made, on our first discussion day, of things that Armantrout's poems DON'T do. There's no narrative, no clear feelings, emotions, or memories, no voice or persona, no center. We also said things like there were no recurring images or evident themes, no "real" or "hidden" meanings. After reading and discussing the whole book, I don't think that's entirely true. I think there are recurring "themes," if you will.
Pop culture, for instance. I noticed, more specifically, television shows and movies. For example, on page 35:
"Melinda is comforted by Jed
when she twists her ankle trying
to evade an angry ghost.
Unanswered questions
change things
between Booth and Bone."
These are two television shows that I know--the first being "Ghost Whisperer" and the second being "Bones." Both are shows centered around death in some way.
Another pop culture reference that really stood out to me was on page 88:
"The playboy scion of a weapons company repents. His
company, he sees now, is corrupt, his weapons being
sold (behind his back) to strong men. Alone, he builds a
super weapon in the shape of a man. Now, more power-
ful and more innocent than ever before, he attacks."
Who can tell me they did not think of Iron Man when they read this???
And, actually, the last sentence of that paragraph really stood out to me. I feel like Armantrout was making a statement, here. Is this playboy really more innocent with this new, super weapon? He does end up killing the bad guys, as opposed to other superheroes who make it a point not to kill anyone.
Another common thread mentioned during our discussions was cancer. It was mentioned during our discussion of "Translation"; something about the dreamlike feeling of the mockingbird in the second stanza and the "Check to see" calling of the birds gave the slight impression of an ICU.
The cancer theme came up more prominently in the poem, "Integer" : "A healthy cell/ exhibits contact inhibition" (93). That means the when cells touch each other, they stop growing. Those that keep growing tend to end up as tumors.
With the subject of cancer popping up everywhere and me totally missing it, I looked up Armantrout's relation to cancer. It turns out she did have cancer: adrenal cortical cancer. It was though that she wouldn't live much longer, but somehow, she pulled through and shows no signs of recurring. I wonder if the poems with snippets of cancer in them were written during her experience or after the fact.
So, yes, there were a lot of things that didn't make sense in Versed. But there were also some that kind of did. I ended up enjoying this book. I think that happens a lot when you actually understand what you read.
Apparently, she likes to listen to Lady Gaga: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/apr/18/pulitzer-in-hand-a-poet-revels-in-words-and-life/
When we first read Armantrout at the beginning of the semester (and even when we started to delve into her book later on) I admit, I was very unsure of my ability to close-read her poems. In fact, her kind of poetry is one of the reasons that poetry, in general, scares me. At a glance, it's just a string of words that make no sense. And why would I bother to read something like that?
I recall the list we made, on our first discussion day, of things that Armantrout's poems DON'T do. There's no narrative, no clear feelings, emotions, or memories, no voice or persona, no center. We also said things like there were no recurring images or evident themes, no "real" or "hidden" meanings. After reading and discussing the whole book, I don't think that's entirely true. I think there are recurring "themes," if you will.
Pop culture, for instance. I noticed, more specifically, television shows and movies. For example, on page 35:
"Melinda is comforted by Jed
when she twists her ankle trying
to evade an angry ghost.
Unanswered questions
change things
between Booth and Bone."
These are two television shows that I know--the first being "Ghost Whisperer" and the second being "Bones." Both are shows centered around death in some way.
Another pop culture reference that really stood out to me was on page 88:
"The playboy scion of a weapons company repents. His
company, he sees now, is corrupt, his weapons being
sold (behind his back) to strong men. Alone, he builds a
super weapon in the shape of a man. Now, more power-
ful and more innocent than ever before, he attacks."
Who can tell me they did not think of Iron Man when they read this???
And, actually, the last sentence of that paragraph really stood out to me. I feel like Armantrout was making a statement, here. Is this playboy really more innocent with this new, super weapon? He does end up killing the bad guys, as opposed to other superheroes who make it a point not to kill anyone.
Another common thread mentioned during our discussions was cancer. It was mentioned during our discussion of "Translation"; something about the dreamlike feeling of the mockingbird in the second stanza and the "Check to see" calling of the birds gave the slight impression of an ICU.
The cancer theme came up more prominently in the poem, "Integer" : "A healthy cell/ exhibits contact inhibition" (93). That means the when cells touch each other, they stop growing. Those that keep growing tend to end up as tumors.
With the subject of cancer popping up everywhere and me totally missing it, I looked up Armantrout's relation to cancer. It turns out she did have cancer: adrenal cortical cancer. It was though that she wouldn't live much longer, but somehow, she pulled through and shows no signs of recurring. I wonder if the poems with snippets of cancer in them were written during her experience or after the fact.
So, yes, there were a lot of things that didn't make sense in Versed. But there were also some that kind of did. I ended up enjoying this book. I think that happens a lot when you actually understand what you read.
Apparently, she likes to listen to Lady Gaga: http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/2010/apr/18/pulitzer-in-hand-a-poet-revels-in-words-and-life/
Thursday, October 7, 2010
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
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
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