Versed

By Rae Armantrout

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2010)
Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award (2009)

Rae Armantrout has always organized her collections of poetry as though they were works in themselves. Versed brings two of these sequences together, offering readers an expanded view of the arc of her writing. The poems in the first section, Versed, play with vice and versa, the perversity of human consciousness. They flirt with error and delusion, skating on a thin ice that inevitably cracks: "Metaphor forms / a crust / beneath which / the crevasse of each experience." Dark Matter, the second section, alludes to more than the unseen substance thought to make up the majority of mass in the universe. The invisible and unknowable are confronted directly as Armantrout's experience with cancer marks these poems with a new austerity, shot through with her signature wit and stark unsentimental thinking. Together, the poems of Versed part us from our assumptions about reality, revealing the gaps and fissures in our emotional and linguistic constructs, showing us ourselves where we are most exposed. A reader's companion is available at http://versedreader.site.wesleyan.edu/

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780819571106

Rae Armantrout

RAE ARMANTROUTt has fifteen previous books including Versed, which received a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Award, and a National Book Critics Circle Award; Finalists, Conjure, Wobble (finalist for a National Book Award), Partly: New and Selected Poems, Itself, Just Saying, and Money Shot. Armantrout is Professor Emerita of Writing at the University of California at San Diego. She has been published in many anthologies, including, The Oxford Book of American Poetry, and Scribner's Best American Poetry, and in such magazines as, Harpers, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Scientific American, Chicago Review, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review.

Book preview

Versed

Results

1

Click here to vote

on who’s ripe

for a makeover

or takeover

in this series pilot.

Votes are registered

at the server

and sent back

as results.

2

Click here to transform

oxidation

into digestion.

From this point on,

it’s a lattice

of ends

disguised as means:

the strangler fig,

the anteater.

3

I’ve developed the ability

to revise

what I’m waiting for

so that letter

becomes dinner

gradually

while the contrapuntal

noddingof the Chinese elm leaves

redistributes

ennui

Versed

The self-monitoring function

of each cell

writ large,

personified—

a person.

*

The Issues of the Day

are mulled steadily

by surrogates.

*

Metaphor forms

a crust

beneath which

the crevasse

of each experience.

*

Traversed

by robotic surveyors.

*

Mother yells, Good job!

when he drops the stick,

Good job!

when he walks in her direction

Fetch

1

Was it a flaming mouse

that burned Mares’ house down

or was it just the wind?

On Tuesday Mares and his nephew

stood by the original version.

Is this plausible?

Fire Chief Chavez said Tuesday

that he thought so.

2

Let’s see

your itty-

bitten specificity

fetish,

your mom’s phantasmic

what’s-it

held conspicuously

under threat.

Day hoists its mesh

of near

approximations,

(its bright

skein of pores.)

Eyes fetch thrown

shadows

Address

The way my interest

in their imaginary

kiss

is secretly addressed

to you.

*

Without

Reviews for Versed

[poetontheone · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Armantrout forces the reader to redefine their relationship with language. At first, reading Armantrout is a lover's quarrel, but after awhile inturns into really good make up sex. She utilizes the power of sounds and their connotations, of stolen phrases overheard on the street, and turns into poetic collages to be questioned and pondered. Even when dealing with very personal themes, such as her battle with cancer, Armantrout approaches such material through a shocking and fresh paradigm of language that is in turns both detached and playful. An interesting and challenging poet. Her work will be seen by many as quite confusing (maybe even nonsensical), but it deserves a level of contemplation from the reader equal to the amount of perplexity it births.

[andreablythe · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not my favorite book of poetry. Armantrout writes short simple lines with short stanzas. The poems tend to come with numbered (I'm sure there's another name for it) chapters or sections, and often I couldn't see what the connection between each one was. The overall message of each poem elluded me, and I kept thinking that a chapter/section could be a poem all on its own. Poetry comes down to resonance with me, and different poetry resonates with different people. In the end, with one or two exceptions (in which I wanted to hold the stanza or line forever), the vast majority poetry in this book did not resonate with me. Maybe it will work for someone else.

[blacksheepdances · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

National Book Award Finalist 2010 Pulitzer Prize winner for PoetryVersed by Rae Armantrout made me feel pretty ignorant (more than usual anyway!). I know that her work has always been highly respected, but when I first picked it up, I just didn’t get it. A few phrases, here and there, would resonate, but then the lines would go off the track I imagined they were on. I’m fine with stream-of-consciousness writing, but that doesn’t describe it either. Quite simply, I was lost. I put the collection down to return to another time.In the meantime, The New Yorker had an article about Armantrout’s winning the Pulitzer Prize for this collection, and explained in length not just her biography but her status as a Language poet. Language poets were once a cultural rebellion against Post- Modern poets, but have now become more mainstream, and of them, she’s known as the best. The essay explained how her poems are often cryptic with double meanings and turns that are meant to wake up the reader, to shock them out of numb reality. With this in mind, I went back and reread each piece. I confess that most are still over my head, I can’t make the connections. But a few really did give me pause. And I think that is how she should be read: not in a hurry to finish but to slowly unravel. From Outer:“I’m the one who can’t know if the scraggly old woman putting a gallon of vodka in her shopping cart feels guilty, defiant, or even glamorous as she does so. She may imagine herself as an actress playing an alcoholic in a film.Removal activates glamour?To see yourself as if from the outside – though not as others see you.”All in all, trying to figure out the meanings was fascinating, like the first few games of Sudoku. But after awhile, just as Sudoku gets more difficult, this felt like more work than I was willing to invest. I just don’t have that in me, to understand what these mean. I am too simple for these complexities. However, someone with a stronger background in poetry, especially Language poetry, would likely enjoy this special collection.