Rae Armantrout
Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with the Language poets. Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California but grew up in San Diego. She has published ten books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies. Armantrout currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego, where she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics.
On March 11, 2010, Armantrout was awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for her book of poetry Versed published by the Wesleyan University Press, which had also been nominated for the National Book Award. The book later earned the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Armantrout’s most recent collection, Money Shot, was published in February 2011. She is the recipient of numerous other awards for her poetry, including most recently an award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008.
“The feeling of emptiness is a pre-existing condition. Jargon forces intimacy.”
“So much happiness is caged in language, ready to burst out anytime and fade”
“We sleep together in the dark but confuse light with love.”
“Perfect molecules of plastic sheet the seas.”
“Now light sits in the chairs”
“this route is only one of several imaginary paths.”
“Thus drivers inching southward will see the phalanx of birds heading west as one spontaneous gesture.”
“Metaphor is ritual sacrifice. It kills the look-alike. No, metaphor is homeopathy.”
“A receipt blown crazily across the parking lot, was, perhaps, a moth.”
“But here I hold your dream in my poem.”
“The ghosts swarm. They speak as one person. Each has left something undone.”
“an undiscovered tumor squats on her kidney.”
“I existed finally as the idea of temporal extension.”
“The future is all around here.' It's a place, anyplace where we don't exist.”
“I know you by your willingness.”
“I'm composed largely of what the streets and rooms look like, of how to arrive 'just' here.”
“Evening succeeds evening.”
“Proscenium of nearly identical mountain ridges, arched out and downward, one 'after' another, to the valley floor: curtains tied back, a gesture”
“To reinvent anomalous figments.”
“The jacaranda, for instance, is beautiful but not serious.”
“Carried by light, images remain while sensation is so evanescent as to be always beyond belief.”
“Mozart creates a universe out of pleasantries.”
“Metaphor forms a crust beneath which the crevasse of each experience.”
“As a child, I was abandonedin a storymade of trees.Here’s the smallgaspof this clearingcome “upon” “again”
“SimpleComplex systems can arisefrom simple rules.It's notthat we want to survive,it's that we've been druggedand made to actas if we dowhile all the whilethe sea breaksand rolls, painlessly, under.If we're not copying it,we're lonely.Is this the knowledgethat demands to bepassed down?Time is made from swatchesof heaven and hell.If we're not killing it,we're hungry.”
“Ends Meet1Could betime is practice,balance,the actionexecuted in the mindbefore and after.Where does mind end?2We mark a breakwith what has come before,come through the door,down the hatch.Not a clean breakexactly.3Our life was rehearsal,Mother almost saidso that we believedwe would escort herto the futurewhere she could be happy.”
“We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.”
“A sense of mission lostin ink'sjagged outcrops.I was trying to tell myselfwhat I must have knownbeforein a formI wouldn't recognize at first.”
“When I dreamed about flying,it was as a skillI needed to regain. ”