Soon, in a moment, you will hear Rae Armantrout.
Rae grew up in California, attended San Diego State,
and UC Berkeley, and then became a student in creative writing
at San Francisco State.
In the Bay Area she became close with other poets
that she's still associated with and friends with.
Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, Barrett Watten,
and other people associated with this group,
sometimes called Language poets.
But I think that can be troubled a bit.
Poets involved in pushing--
oh, no, I need that on.
You need that on?
Yeah.
Oh, I'm sorry.
OK.
This is what I said.
Other poets associated with pushing or seeding poetry
in a new direction.
These were writers with politically-- these
were writers who are politically conscious, busy
fracturing the assumed language into parts
making text take risks.
Armantrout moved back to San Diego in 1978
and began teaching writing at UC San
Diego where she has directed the New Writing series since 1989.
Rae Armantrout is the author of eight books of poetry,
including her newest, Up To Speed, available outside.
And her selected poems just recently published
entitled Veil.
In the year 2000 a collection of essays about Rae Armantrout's
work was published entitled, A Wild Salience,
which among the writers-- the writings of many
include an essay on her greatest work by Tucson's own Charles
Alexander.
And I just want to say this is a one line from one of the poems
that I like a lot, and in a way shows a certain allegiance
that Rae's work bears to, say, Emily Dickinson.
So this may conjure an Emily Dickinson line.
And this is a line that's somewhat typical of the way Rae
Armantrout sees things.
The line is just--
"My life has stood--
had stood a little speech, a clipped coupon."
OK.
It's funny.
[LAUGHTER]
And that's the thing is Rae's work is,
I think it's hilarious.
And so-- and all the-- in the many, many reviews of her work
that I've read everyone tries to have
this kind of extremely effusive description
of the way her poems work.
So I have one to.
Rae's work-- this is what I wrote in marker and pen.
[LAUGHTER]
"Rae's work deals with the fabric of language
that enfolds and creates us.
She takes the net through it, capturing instances of speech,
commercial speech, corporate speech, science speech --
scientific speech, and intimate speech,
and takes them like delicate moths,
and pins them into her poems.
Except that the moths are not delicate, they are still alive,
and they have little fangs."
[LAUGHTER]
And then I went on to say, "Rae finds innocuous enough seeming
glitches in the language that to her signal something serious
might be going on similar to the way déjá vu in the movie The
Matrix means that the master computer system is making some
sort of shift or direction."
It's like when they see the cat twice walk
through the room [INAUDIBLE].
But also [INAUDIBLE] I found a brief description
that perhaps Rae [INAUDIBLE] of a class
she is teaching at Naropa.
It says, "Our heads are full of voices of family,
and friends, newscasters, and celebrities.
Does the poet try to silence such inner voices in order
to find her own?
Or can she use them to make a polyphonic text.
The poems you read, write in this course will
deal with voice and voices."
So I'd say in the reading you're about to hear you will be
dealing with voice and voices.
But as a little illustration for those of you
to whom her poetry might be unfamiliar,
I thought I would have a little illustration of something that
seems--
that it could have come right out of one of her poems.
Which is a scene from the 1985 movie, "Explorers,"
starring the young Ethan Hawke and River Phoenix,
who go in to build a spacecraft in their backyard.
And they go into space and then they make their own spaceship
where there are these creatures who they're
trying to communicate with and they
get more and more frustrated because these creatures only
speak in signal--
in communicative signals that they've
received from the Earth, from TV, radio, and other signals.
And so this is--
like they get frustrated.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- What is your name?
That's-- that's your name.
[END PLAYBACK]
So wait.
So he's trying to figure out what this person's name is.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- Quack.
- I don't know, Quack.
- Whack.
- What's your name?
That's-- that's your name
[LAUGHTER]
- I'm Ben.
Me Ben.
- Me Tarzan.
[TARZAN YELL]
[LAUGHTER]
- [MONKEY SCREECHING] What will I have to do, eat a banana?
[LAUGHTER]
- No [INAUDIBLE].
- Come on jump in.
- They know all about us.
[LAUGHTER]
- [INAUDIBLE].
- You see.
- Wow.
[BEEPING]
[END PLAYBACK]
And so forth.
OK.
So anyway without any further talking,
Rae will come share her poetry with us
and talk a little bit about where it comes from.
[APPLAUSE]