Wobble

By Rae Armantrout

Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rae Armantrout is at once a most intimate and coolly calculating poet. If anyone could produce a hybrid of Charlie Chaplin's playful "Little Tramp" and Charlize Theron's fierce "Imperator Furiosa," it would be Armantrout. Her language is unexpected yet exact, playing off the collective sense that the shifting ground of daily reality may be a warning of imminent systemic collapse. While there are glimmers here of what remains of "the natural world," the poet confesses the human failings, personal and societal, that have led to its devastation. No one's senses are more acutely attuned than Armantrout's, which makes her an exceptional observer and reporter of our faults. She leaves us wondering if the American Dream may be a nightmare from which we can't awaken. Sometimes funny, sometimes alarming, the poems in Wobble play peek-a-boo with doom.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Release date: Oct 16, 2018
• ISBN: 9780819578242

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

Making

What made this happen?

you ask every time

as if

compulsion itself

were mandatory,

the way light travels

at the speed of light

because it must

It is in no sense

essential

that this crown of leaves,

sifted by wind

as if turning over

some problem,

is a gray-green

brightening into rust-red

at the tips

or that its equivocations

fill this instant

to the brim.

While light

has caught up

to itself

again

and only seems

to be making

time

Asymmetries

I’m thinking about you and you’re humming while cutting a piece of wood.

I’m positive you aren’t thinking about me which is fine as long as you

aren’t thinking about yourself. I know and love the way you inhabit

this house and the occasions we mutually create. But I don’t know

the man you picture when you see yourself walking around

the world inside your head and I’m jealous

of the attention you pay that person

whom I suspect

of being devious.

Speech Acts

Something’s going around.

The crows

started it.

No language

can tell us

which crow.

You who

in the

mama turnpike

sexy tough shit

steady state

thought bubble song

churn

What’s new? Presence

as fad.

Humans

photo-bomb the planet,

pop up everywhere

because incongruous

is funny

and we want you

to know

The Craft Talk

So that the best thing you could do, it seemed, was climb inside the machine

that was language and feel what it wanted or was capable of doing at any

point, steering only occasionally.

The best thing was to let language speak its piece while standing inside it—

not like a knight in armor exactly, not like a mascot in a chicken suit.

The best thing was to create in the reader or listener an uncertainty as to

where the voice she heard was coming from so as to frighten her a little.

Why should I want to frighten her?

Conflation

As a tree

is concerted

atmosphere. Each

one a certain

ambience

drawn in and held

until it turns

green?

You go on

drawing energy

from

Reviews for Wobble

[dreesie-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I understood very few poems in this collection and liked even fewer. For the most part these poems are very choppy. Most of the poems have a title, and then a few phrases making a sentence, then a break and another set of phrases that connects to the title maybe but not the first section, and the a third section.Not my cup of tea at all. I can't link the sections together, and most of the time I didn't know what she was getting at. I prefer poetry about experiences or nature, not about...thoughts? I did like: SilosTunnel VisionRefresh

[shawislandlibrary · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

As the Beats of the 50s faded and the late 60s ushered in the "Language" (or L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E) poets, a new focus, perhaps, was achieved that looked at language-meaning-as-construction, implicating the reader as proactive mediator... or, we can just sit back and enjoy the poetry..."Look,/ in this spread/ for leather products,/ a stern-faced man/ in pink pants/ and a bomber jacket/ stands on satin sheets/ in front of a leopard print/ wallpaper/ holding a small briefcase/ or purse.// The market hates you/ even more/ than you hate yourself." (Brian)