Versed by Rae Armantrout – a Book Review

 Versed by Rae Armantrout – a Book Review

By Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
November 30, 2010

 

Terry Eagleton provides a non-poetic definition of poem:  “A poem is a fictional, verbally inventive moral statement in which it is the author, rather than the printer or word processor, who decides where the lines should end.” ¹ Some poems have end rhyming, some don’t, some use strict metres, and some are more dynamic.

Rae Armantrout’s magnificent collection of poems in Versed have varieties in line endings, internal rhymes and rhythms, forms and metaphors, while intense burst of imageries in simple words, constructed like frothing ocean waves, one after another, leaving the trails of dispersed pathos in poetic but delicate flare.

An example:

Equals

1.

As if, after all,

the thing that comes to mind

squared

times inertia

equalled the “real.”

2.

One lizard

Jammed headfirst

down the throat

of a second.

 Rae Armantrout explores the world of spirit and deity, with not “so foreclosed question” in poem New Genres:

1 

A witness claims to have seen a spirit. From this premise,

a ragged band sets out,

trampling through an old house in the dark,

joking or bickering,

carrying equipment meant to measure “fluctuations.”

The existence of the spirit

should remain an open –

so foreclosed –

question.

2

Pockets of self-reference arise. As if I

could read the mind of the creator,

I already see the father

is the stalker

he pursues

and, eventually,

neutralizes

I don’t recollect reading much of Rae Armantrout’s poems before. If one recites her poem aloud, slowly reading each word with paying careful attention to spaces and breaks of the lines, it feels that more is unsaid but is almost tangible, as if mysterious reality about to be unravelled. Here is a ponderous poem “New” that talks “about the camera”:

If yellow

Is the new black,

the new you

is a cartoon

spokesman

who blows his lines

around bumptious 3-D

Hondas,

apologizes often,

and remains cheerful.

*

The new pop song

Is about getting real:

“You had a bad day.

The camera don’t lie.”

But they’re lying

to you

about the camera.

*

Since Fallujah

is the new Antigua,

sunlight nibbles

on pre-

charred

terrain

in the electric fireplace.

The voice in her poems, sometimes gulps the remaining air of sanity in overwhelming fluorescence of clarity, though tiptoeing the meaning of “change” by “insisting only on insistence”. The poem “Own” throws luminescence toward trajectory of sorrowing reality:

Woman in a room near mine moans, “I’m dying. I want

to be fine. It’s my body!

Don’t let me! Don’t touch me!”

*

By definition,

I’m the blip

Floating across my own

“field of vision…”

*

On closed eyes I see the spartan wall of the ICU

covered in a scrambled hodge-podge of sticky notes,

crossing one another at all angles,

illegibly written over, snippets of reference,

madly irrelevant.

*

Symbolism as the party face of paranoia.

Chorus of expert voices beyond my door, forever

Dissecting my case.

“But the part is sick

of representing the whole.”

*

“We will prevail,”

says the leader on multiple

screens. The words

are empty, but he’s there

inside the lie

everyone believes –

that nothing

will really change. He’s become pure

being, insisting

only on insistence.

*

A crowd (scene) of cells, growing wildly,

by random access to stock types,

(Play any role you like and go on

forever. Who is speaking?)

Able to draw blood vessels to itself

by emitting a mock distress call.

*

From deep time,

patterns

on my grandmother’s crockery

rise

to cover my closed eyelids,

lumpy fruits and flowers, brown

against a cream background.

*

Dream that Aaron is telling friends to be quiet because

he’s listening to a rumble, a white noise voice from his

own intestines which he believes is telling him how to

save me. “SHH!” he says to anyone who speaks.

From her own personal battle with cancer the poetess Rae Armantrout invokes solemnity, describing the patient perched in an examination table, and the doctor and the nurse duo, who are either “smug” or “snug” in their “relative safety” from the terrible gruesomeness of cancer, deftly delineating a scene in her poem “Together” that may be found in any hospital:

Now I am always perched on a metal examination table.

Two people, a doctor and a nurse, come at intervals

To tell me whether I will live or die. They do this with

practiced solemnity. They’re smug or snug in their

habits, their relative safety, of course, but that is to be

expected. And I wait expectantly, even eagerly, as if I

might be of some help. If the news is bad, I imagine,

they will direct our attention to an area of concern. For

a moment, we will lean together toward that place.

The book has two parts, containing 87 total poems. The first part is named Versed, and the second part is Dark Matter. The very first poem “Around” in the second part describes “The future is all around us”, reads like a reminder to human final destiny:

Time is pleased

to draw itself

                                out,

permit itself

pendulous loops,

to allow them

meaning,

this meaning,

as it goes

                along.

*

Chuck and I are pleased

to have found a spot

where my ashes can be scattered.

It looks like a construction site

now

but it’s adjacent

to a breathtaking, rocky coast.

Chuck sees places

where he might snorkel.

We’re being shown through

by a sort of realtor.

We’re interested but can’t get her

to fix the price.

*

“The future

is all around us.”

It’s a place,

anyplace

where we don’t exist.

“anyplace where we don’t exist”, true for us the mortal beings, but the time defying poetry can certainly outlast the virulence of cancerous cells and fabled and vacuous “insisting only on insistence” modern paradox.

References

1.       Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem.  Blackwell Publishing, 2007, p. 25.

2.       Armantrout, Rae.  Versed, Wesleyan University Press, 2009

1