Rae Armantrout, Go Figure

 

REASONS

1

The snake was a fall guy.

That tree
was temptation enough.

Staged apples,
drop-dead gorgeous.

 

2.

“Not in my body!”
they shout.

Benzene in the shampoo;
lead in the water;
pesticide in fruit.

They mean the new vaccine, but
isn’t there more to it?

Water on fire;
neonicotinoids in nectar;
black and tarry
stools

The latest from San Diego poet Rae Armantrout [see my review of her prior collection here] is Go Figure (Middletown CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2024), adding a further heft to an already heft of multiple award-winning poetry collections going back decades. There is something intriguing about how the poems in Go Figure cluster, offering Armantrout as less a poet of single, self-contained poems than sequences of gestural sweeps that cohere into this meditative book-length suite, threading through numerous ebbs and flows as she goes. Her poems interact with each other, including poems that end sans punctuation, suggesting a kind of ongoingness, beyond the scope of the single page. As the opening of the poem “SHRINK WRAP” reads: “An idea is / an arrangement // of pictures / of things // shrunken / to fit // in the brain / of a human.” Armantrout’s poems are constructed through extended lines of precise, abstract thinking, providing specifics that accumulate into something far larger, and far more coherent, than the sum of their parts. Armantrout’s poems throughout Go Figure offer points on a grid progressing a single extended sequence of thought, as the author addresses culture, climate and financial crises, as well as echoes and influence from her grandchildren. At the core, Armantrout’s poems articulate how our experiences are held by and solidified through words, the very foundation of language that allow shape and coherence, meaning and context to those very same experiences. As the poem “DOTS” opens:

Poems elongate moments.

“My pee is hot,” she said,
dreamily, mildly
surprised

There is something, too, about the openness of her lyric: if you haven’t read Armantrout’s work before, one might say that any book of hers might be a good place to start, but I’ll say this: if you haven’t read her work before, Go Figure is a good place to start. Or, as the first part of the two-part title poem reads:

First she made up the schedule,
and the rules,

Then the desire to break them or,
worse yet,
the yen to follow them.

You put your left foot out;
you pull your left foot in.

You do it all again
and laugh.

What next?

“Go figure,” she said.

Line up your letters
and shake them all about.

Play CAT,
then TAG.

Someone will play dead.

 

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Jaz Papadopoulos

jaz papadopoulos (they/them) is an interdisciplinary writer, educator and video artist. They hold an MFA from the University of British Columbia and are a Lambda Literary Fellow. A self-described emotionalist and avid Anne Carson fan, jaz is interested in media, horticulture, lyricism, nervous systems, anarchism and erotics. Originally from Treaty 1 territory, jaz currently resides on unceded Syilx lands. I Feel That Way Too is their debut poetry collection.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?
This is my first book, and it hasn't quite come out yet, so it's hard to say! Probably, it has been extraordinary for my self-esteem and self-perception as a writer.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?
I'd say I came to clowning first, and then critical theory, and then came to see experimental writing as the clowning of language. My poetry (and non-fiction) are also fairly hybridized, lyrical forms: I'll write an essay, and people call it a poem. For me, various forms are just part of the process, and I don't know until the last edits what genre the final form will take.
 
3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?
It depends on the context. Am I writing on contract, with a set deadline? I'll take notes for 90% of the time, and then write the entire thing in the last 10% of days. If I'm writing for my own process, well, it's even slower; there will likely never be a final shape because without an externally-imposed deadline, I'll likely never finish a thing. I think I could pull 4+ books out of all the half-writings I have tucked in notebooks in my bookshelf.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?
I'm someone who loves puzzles. I love the chaos of a pile of pieces which, in their pile-form, are meaningless and frustrating. I get immense pleasure from the slow process of organizing the pieces, finding the similar shapes and colours, and painstakingly organizing them into shapes that make sense.

The same is true for my writing. Things start as a feeling, an image, a colour blooming in the chest. I write on  sentence/paragraph at a time, and then eventually I collect all the little fragments, cut the pieces of paper into squares, and arrange and rearrange them until I like the final shape. (Yes, I literally print things off, cut them up, and arrange them all over the floor. To my cat's delight.)

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?
If all I did was talk into a microphone, I would be so happy.
 
6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?
There is so much I could say here. I am obsessed––obsessed––with language. I see language as the meaning-making tool that translates the world around us into our minds, and mediates nearly all our experiences. Because of this, it's also a meaning-making tool in the context of power, oppression and freedom. I'm heavily influenced by Foucault in this way (like I said, I came to poetry through critical theory.)

Orwell's 1984 is a great example of how a government limits the thoughts of its people through language; the way news and media outlets attach specific words to marginalized people is another one (see: comparisons of how the war in Ukraine and the genocide in Palestine are described differently). Words shape how we think about things, and how words create oppression versus freedom is my main concern most of the time. I think as we move into an increasingly-online world of increasingly partitioned media, AI-generated (false) information, and low media literacy, this will more and more become a question concerning everyone.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Do they even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?
I'm not prescriptive about this. I think my own role as a writer in larger culture is to help people see nuance––beauty and violence––in the mundane.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?
I prefer it! I love being in collaboration, and hearing how an outside mind perceives what I'm communicating. (Please, someone, invite me to your writing group.)

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?
This is the Anne Carson quote currently sticky-noted to my desktop: "The things you link are not in your control...But how you link them shows the nature of your mind." It gives me a sense of confidence and peace about my writerly impulses. I think the nature of my mind is pretty interesting, so why wouldn't I want to share it?!

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?
I mostly do contract work, so my routine shifts every couple of months based on what's going on in my life. Which is to say, routine is a fantasy that mostly eludes me. The ideal would be: wake up, short meditation, coffee while writing morning pages, and then on with the day.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?
I research! Sometimes that looks like reading, other times it's making people talk at me on the topic at hand.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?
The warmth of cooking in the air. Nivea chapstick. Home Depot.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?
For me, everything is rooted in relationship. I had a huge "aha" moment when reading T. Fleischmann's Time Is the Thing a Body Moves Through, when the author described Felix Gonzalez-Torres' art practice as always making things for his lover, Ross. Everything as a love letter. I am a very romantically-inclined person, and my art practice became much clearer to me when I considered every word on the page to ultimately be a love letter with a specific recipient in mind.

All that said, I think any productive material (a book, a tapestry, a leaf-covered tree) can inform me. What is this all if not some form of information?

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?
Anne Carson and Edward Said are everything to me. Jeanette Winterson has done a lot. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Dorothea Lasky. Hera Lindsay Bird.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?
Currently I'm seeking a 2 gallon jar to make my first batch of kombucha (10 years late, I know).

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?
There are alternate universes where I am a contemporary dancer, a lawyer, a business mogul, a house spouse.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?
Ah, but I do both/all! But I would say that having financial stability is what has allowed me to dedicate so much time to writing. If I had to work more, I would never have enough space in my brain to let the words bounce around.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film?
Noopiming: The Cure for White Ladies by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson; Piaffe by director Ann Oren.

19 - What are you currently working on?
Besides my own web copy? lol. Fragments about my summer garlic farming with friends. Specifically, about managing our group chat :)

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Julie Carr, UNDERSCORE

 

Sentences I’ve often said

The unmanifested face was my mother’s and I kissed it.
She was very near phobic so we kept things quiet.

With a pencil in my mouth I wrote on my tongue: loved, unloved.

I am hypocritically awake.

The latest from Denver poet Julie Carr is the collection UNDERSCORE (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2024), following a whole slew of titles, including Mead: An Epithalamion (University of Georgia Press, 2004), Equivocal (Alice James Books, 2007), 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta Press, 2010; Omnidawn, 2023), Sarah-Of Fragments and Lines (Coffee House Press, 2010), Rag (Omnidawn, 2014) [see my review of such here], Think Tank (New York NY: Solid Objects, 2015) [see my review of such here], Objects from a Borrowed Confession (Boise ID: Ahsahta Press, 2017) [see my review of such here] and Real Life: An Installation (Oakland CA: Omnidawn Publishing, 2018) [see my review of such here]. As the colophon offers on the collection, the collection “is dedicated to two of Carr’s foundational teachers, the dancer Nancy Stark Smith and the poet Jean Valentine, both of whom died in 2020. Elegiac and tender-at-times erotic at other times bitter—these poems explore the passions of friendship and love for the living and the dead.”

The poems hold both the tension of the pandemic-era lockdowns and an outreach, composing poems for an array of friends and friendships, including two important friends and mentors who died during the first year of Covid-19 pandemic lockdown: American dancer Nancy Stark Smith (1952-2020) and poet Jean Valentine (1934-2020), to whom the collection is dedicated. As the opening poem, “Was the world,” ends: “Cruising and wordless in its // breadth breaching river’s dusk // from out of the past of the // hills, it heads down // into dust, for and of it.” Underscored by a series of movements and music, Carr’s title emerges from Nancy Stark Smith’s “long-form dance improvisational structure,” one that has been “evolving since 1990 and is practiced all over the globe.” From Smith’s own website:

The Underscore is a vehicle for incorporating Contact Improvisation into a broader arena of improvisational dance practice; for developing greater ease dancing in spherical space—alone and with others; and for integrating kinesthetic and compositional concerns while improvising. It allows for a full spectrum of energetic and physical expressions, embodying a range of forms and changing states. Its practice is familiar yet unpredictable.

The practice—usually 3 to 4 hours in length—progresses through a broad range of dynamic states, including long periods of very small, private, and quiet internal activity and other times of higher energy and interactive dancing.

Held to that pandemic-era as a kind of lyric portrait of the author’s attentions during that period, the poems in UNDERSCORE are made up of a myriad of precise lyric threads, sharp and supple as glass; straight lines and statements, whether direct or indirect, that strike, sleek and overlap. “Out-gutted and cried-out,” her poem “100 days” begins, “I left the house for food. // I would, I thought, walk the alley / with a phone strapped to my forehead like a lamp. // To cough, to soak a pillow, to take it, to yearn for the hand of a mother, / not your mother, not anyone’s, an un-mother, an unknowable un-hand of an / un-mother to no one.” Carr composes birthday poems, letters and collaborative calls-and-response (including one I was part of, which resulted in a collaborative chapbook; her poems subsequently reworked for the sake of this current collection). UNDERSCORE works through revisions, declarations, dedications, contemplations and scraps, all held in pristine, rhythmic harmony. From the extended lyric “17 letters for Lisa at the start [3.12.20 – 4.30.20],” a poem that suggests a reference to her friend, the Austin, Texas-based poet Lisa Olstein, with whom she composed the collaborative call-and-response non-fiction collection, Climate (Essay Press, 2022) [see my review of such here]:

Because you need to rest, I speak to you where you cannot hear me. The kids are
curled or flat open: new and newish leaves. The pathogens in the house, the yeast.

There’s a structural echo here reminiscent of the carved lines of Equivocal (which, until this current collection, had been the collection of Carr’s I felt the deepest kinship with or connection to), a concordance and weave of lines and lyrics, held together as a kind of pastiche. “She said it’s not done with you yet. I agreed,” she writes, to open the prose poem “It,” “but had no way to approach it, to find out what it wanted from me that it had not yet got.” The poems in UNDERSCORE offer a halt, a halt, a hush; a carved, sharp sequence of accumulating lines set across an incredible rhythm and pacing that propels, pivots and swings, such as the poem “Apples,” dedicated “for Patti Siedman (1944-2022),” that includes:

I would not allow her to leave me is a confused object.

Like a dinner plate in a bookshelf, or a glass of coiled guitar strings.

I keep saying five, but there were six.

For how do we count the faces of the dead?

 

new from above/ground press: Rhodes, Smith, McElroy, Pittella, Pirie, Banks, Farrant, Hajnoczky + Touch the Donkey #42,

It’s Here / All the Beauty / I Told You About, by Shane Rhodes $6 ; Enter the Hyperreal, by Mahaila Smith $5 ; Small Consonants, by Gil McElroy $5 ; footnotes after Lorca, by Carlos A. Pittella $5 ; Rushing Dusk, by Pearl Pirie $5 ; Tiny Grass Is Dreaming, by Chris Banks $5 ; Touch the Donkey [a small poetry journal] #42 : with new poems by Grant Wilkins, Russell Carisse, Lori Anderson Moseman, Ariana Nash, Wanda Praamsma, Taylor Brown, JoAnna Novak and John Levy $8 ;  The Literary Cow Festival, by M.A.C. Farrant $5 ; By the Shores of Issyk-Kul, by Helen Hajnoczky $5 ;

keep an eye on the above/ground press blog for author interviews, new writing, reviews, upcoming readings and tons of other material;

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July-August 2024
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Forthcoming chapbooks by: Sue Landers, Jason Heroux and Dag T. Straumsvag, Vik Shirley, Alice Burdick, Susan Gevirtz, Carter Mckenzie, Maxwell Gontarek, Conal Smiley, Ian FitzGerald, Nate Logan, Peter Jaeger, Noah Berlatsky, ryan fitzpatrick, russell carisse, JoAnna Novak, Julia Cohen, Andrew Brenza, Mckenzie Strath, John Levy, alex benedict, Ryan Skrabalak, Terri Witek, David Phillips + Scott Inniss! And there’s totally still time to subscribe for 2024, by the way (backdating to January 1st, obviously).