Rae Armantrout. Courtesy Library of Congress.
Rae Armantrout (born April 13, 1947) is an American poet (generally associated with the Language poets) and academic.
Life[]
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.[1]
In 1965, while 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.[1] 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.[1] Armantrout was a member of the original West Coast Language group.
Armantrout teaches at the University of California, San Diego, where she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics.
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),
Writing[]
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.[2] 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.[3]
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".[4] 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."[5]
Recognition[]
Armantrout's poetry has been anthologized in the Oxford Book of American Poetry (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.
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.[6] The book later earned the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
She is the recipient of numerous other awards for her poetry, including an award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008.[7]
Publications[]
Poetry[]
- Extremities. Great Barrington, MA: The Figures, 1978.
- The Invention of Hunger. Berkeley, CA: Tuumba, 1979.
- Precedence. Providence, RI: Burning Deck, 1985
- Necromance. Los Angeles, CA: Sun and Moon Press, 1991.
- Couverture. (Les Cahiers de Royaumont, 1991 (a selection in French translation).
- Made To Seem. Los Angeles, CA: Sun and Moon Press, 1995.
- writing the plot about sets. Tucson, AZ: Chax, 1998.
- Veil: New and selected poems. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.
- The Pretext. Los Angeles, CA: Green Integer, 2001.
- Up to Speed. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2004.
- Next Life. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2007.
- Versed. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009.
- Money Shot. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011.
Prose[]
- True. Berkeley, CA: 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. San Diego, CA: Singing Horse Press, 2007.
Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy Poetry International.[8]
See also[]
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Rae Armantrout reading from her Pulitzer Prize winning book Versed
References[]
- A Wild Salience: The writing of Rae Armantrout (Burning Press, 2000; ISBN 1-5871-10253) — featuring essays and poems on or inspired by her work by Robert Creeley, Susan Wheeler, Hank Lazer, Bob Perelman, Lydia Davis, Lyn Hejinian, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Ron Silliman, Brenda Hillman, Fanny Howe and others
- A Suite of Poetic Voices: "Interview" (with Manuel Brito), (Santa Brigada, Spain: Kadle Books, 1994)
Notes[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Green Integer profile
- ↑ "Rae Armantrout Papers at Stanford University". Sul.stanford.edu. http://www-sul.stanford.edu/depts/hasrg/ablit/amerlit/armant.html. Retrieved 2011-08-19.
- ↑ Author Page at Internationales Literatufestival Berlin Armantrout was a Guest of the ILB ( Internationales Literatufestival Berlin / Germany ) in 2005
- ↑ "Where Every Eye's a Guard: Rae Armantrout's poetry of suspicion" (2002), Boston Review, April/May 2002.. http://bostonreview.net/BR27.2/burt.html.
- ↑ Lerner, Ben. "Rae Armantrout". BOMB Magazine. Winter 2011. Retrieved 26 July 2011.
- ↑ "Faculty poet honored for new collection", Aricleant
- ↑ "Rae Armantrout – 2008 - US & Canada Competition, Creative Arts - Poetry", John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
- ↑ Rae Armantrout (USA, 1947), Poetry International Rotterday, Poetry International Foundation. Web, Dec. 20, 2013.
External links[]
- Poems
- Rae Armantrout at The PIP (Project for Innovative Poetry) Blog: profile & poem, "Necromance"
- Rae Armantrout profile & 8 poems at the Academy of American Poets
- Rae Armantrout b. 1947 at the Poetry Foundation
- Rae Armantrout (USA, 1947) at Poetry International (profile & 10 poems)
- Prose
- "Cosmology and Me" (essay by Armantrout at Jacket)
- Audio / video
- Rae Armantrout at PennSound
- Rae Armantrout at YouTube
- Armantrout interviewed on Bookworm at KCRW, February 26, 2009
- Interview with Armantrout (Audio) PBS NewsHour April 19, 2010. Includes poems and transcript.
- Armantrout at the University of Chicago gives a talk on the lyric poem (March 2011)
- Books
- Rae Armantrout at Amazon.com
- About
- Biography from the international literature festival Berlin
- Rae Armantrout Papers at Stanford
- The UCSD Register of Rae Armantrout Papers, 1954-2009
- Profile at Green Integer
- Interview in BOMB Magazine. Winter 2011
- "The (Pulitzer-Winning) Poet is a Quilter. The Poet is a Collector. The Poet is 62" at Women's voices for change April 14, 2010
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