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The Pretext
Rae Armantrout
publisher: Green Integer, 2001
isbn: 1-892295-3
price: $9.95
Armantrout is one of the quieter, more reliable writers associated with "language" writing, and is usually considered the "lyrical" one in a group often associated with longer, process-oriented works ("new sentence" writing or the works of Hejinian) or, when writing "lyrics," with a subversion of the genre (Bernstein, Perelman, Howe).
Her 1998 autobiographical work, True, demonstrated that she could write a compelling, if not virtuostic, prose, and that her greatest strength as a writer is not stylistic pyrotechnics, grandiose theoretical syntheses, or encyclopedic references but -- like William Carlos Williams, to whom she owes a debt in the curious torquing of her sentences -- an original and quirky turn of mind.
As her brief introduction to The Pretext suggests, Armantrout likes to work by juxtaposition -- "[The poem's] interesting to the extent that the divisions and fitting together arise spontaneously, without pretext" -- and the best poems in this collection are resonant coincidings of short bursts of insight, chance meetings that disclose the meanings inherent in all situations as they exist beyond the deceptive assurances of everyday reason:
I miss circumstance
already --
the way a single word
could mean
necessary, relative,
provisional
and a bird flies past
leaving
the sense that one
has waved one's hand.
[69]
The careful slowness of her lineation -- which rarely rises above the tone of a nearly bureaucratic stating of facts despite the often deft use of off-rhyme -- recalls George Oppen, and some of the pregnant silences of this work are not necessarily aimed at metaphysical revelry (as in, say, Louise Gluck or writers of the "ellipticist" tendency) but toward an ethical dimension to being:
How do I look?
meaning what
could I pass for
when every eye's
a guard
[58]
she writes in "My Associates," and later:
Time's tic:
to pitch forward
then catch 'itself'
again.
'We're' bombing Iraq again.
If I turn on the news,
someone will say, 'We
mean business.'
[67]
She describes exquisitely the elusive interactions of time and thought, suggesting a quasi-Buddhist code of behavior:
Still
one should be patient
with the present
as if with a child.
To follow its prattle --
glitter on water --
indulgently
is only polite.
[25]
Armantrout's idiom, and her philosophical predisposition, is one of nearly monkish spareness -- if she were more despairing and hysterical, she could be a character in one of Beckett's novels -- and sometimes her writing seems to be about the huge distance she feels from her own perceptions -- her surroundings, her thoughts of what to do next -- a distance that may be tied to her sense of herself as a middle-class, more-or-less comfortable Californian:
In my country
facts are dead children.
When I say 'dissociation,'
I may have said 'real-time action.' [...]
Words
can be repeated.
The Distractible Sparrow,
The Smallest District.
The Strictest Definition.
Astronomers know
a signal's
not an answer.
[88]
But for all of that, there is a recognizable human at the center of these poems, one who often comes through with an understated humor, "swinging his arms high / like a drum major, / ghost-of-a-prayer / kind of thing." [57]
Fans of Armantrout's work might be disappointed that this sequence is not more allusive, more grandiose, something to point to as the pinnacle of a reasonably long writing career, but it's clear that her dedication to poetry does not lie in an ego-bedazzled goal to create dramatic gestures across the literary horizon, but rather the desire to get it right in writing -- "Identity is a form / of prayer." [58] -- even if in modest bursts.
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