Rae Armantrout

WRae Armantrout (born 13 April 1947) 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.

Life and work
Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California. An only child, she was raised among military communities on naval bases, predominantly in San Diego. In her autobiography True (1998), she describes herself as have endured an insular childhood, a sensitive child of working class, Methodist fundamentalist parents.

In 1965, whilst living in the Allied Gardens district with her parents, Armantrout attended San Diego State University in 1965, intending to major in anthropology. During her studies she transferred to English and American literature, later studying at the University of California, Berkeley. At Berkeley, she was able to study with poet Denise Levertov and befriend Ron Silliman who would become involved with the Language poets of late 1980s San Francisco. Armantrout graduated from Berkeley in 1970 and married Chuck Korkegian in 1971, whom she had dated since her first year of university. She published poetry in Caterpillar and from this point began to view herself as a poet. She took a Masters degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University, and wrote Extremities (1978), her first book of poetry.

Armantrout was a member of the original West Coast Language group. Although Language poetry can be seen as advocating a poetics of nonreferentiality, Armantrout's work, focusing as it often does on the local and the domestic, resists such definitions. However, unlike most of the group, her work is firmly grounded in experience of the local and domestic worlds and she is widely regarded as the most lyrical of the Language Poets.

Critic Stephen Burt at the Boston Review commented: "William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson together taught Armantrout how to dismantle and reassemble the forms of stanzaic lyric— how to turn it inside out and backwards, how to embody large questions and apprehensions in the conjunctions of individual words, how to generate productive clashes from arrangements of small groups of phrases. From these techniques, Armantrout has become one of the most recognizable, and one of the best, poets of her generation". As Burt noted, and as Armantrout herself acknowledges, her writing was significantly influenced by reading William Carlos Williams, whom she credits with developing her "sense of the line" and her understanding that "line breaks can create suspense and can destabilize meaning through delay." The basic unit of meaning in Armantrout's poetry is either the stanza or the section, and she writes both prose poetry and more traditional stanza-based poems. In a conversation with poet, novelist, and critic Ben Lerner for BOMB Magazine, Armantrout said that she is more likely to write a prose poem "when [she] hear[s] the voice of a conventional narrator in [her] head."

Armantrout's poems have appeared in many anthologies, including In The American Tree (National Poetry Foundation), Language Poetries (New Directions), Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, From the Other Side of the Century (Sun & Moon), Out of Everywhere (Reality Street), American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Language Meets the Lyric Tradition, (Wesleyan, 2002), The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford, UP, 2006) and The Best American Poetry of 1988, 2001, 2002, 2004 and 2007.

Armantrout has twice received a Fund For Poetry Grant and was a California Arts Council Fellowship recipient in 1989. In 2007 she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award.

Recognition
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.

Poetry

 * 1978: Extremities (The Figures)
 * 1979: The Invention of Hunger (Tuumba)
 * 1985: Precedence (Burning Deck)
 * 1991: Necromance (Sun and Moon Press)
 * 1991: Couverture (Les Cahiers de Royaumont) - a selection in French translation
 * 1995: Made To Seem (Sun and Moon Press)
 * 1998: writing the plot about sets (Chax)
 * 2001: Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press)
 * 2001: The Pretext (Green Integer)
 * 2004: Up to Speed (Wesleyan University Press)
 * 2007: Next Life (Wesleyan University Press)
 * 2009: Versed (Wesleyan University Press) - 2010 Pulitzer Prize - Poetry
 * 2011: Money Shot (Wesleyan University Press)

Prose

 * True (Atelos, 1998) - memoir; republished in Collected Prose
 * The Grand Piano: An Experiment In Collective Autobiography (with Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, and Ted Pearson) (Mode A/This Press, 2007)
 * Collected Prose (Singing Horse Press, 2007) - ISBN 0-935162-37-2

Translated

 * Narrativ [English-German, Bilingual edition, translated by Uda Strätling and Martin Göritz] (luxbooks, Wiesbaden 2009 ISBN 978-3-939557-40-1)