Well, we're really happy to have Rae here tonight with us.
She's one of my favorite poets, and so I'll make this quick,
so we can get right to her reading.
Since most of you are fans and are well acquainted
with this poet's distinctive achievements,
I'll speak to those of you who may not
be as familiar with her work or to those who
may find her work difficult.
Rae Armantrout is a Professor of Poetry and Poetics
at UCSD, where she's been teaching for almost 20 years.
She's the author of nine books of poetry.
And her work has been included in countless anthologies.
She's often been associated with feminist writers.
Her poems have been compared to those of the language movement.
She has often been called the founder of that movement.
And scholars have noted the relationship
of her religious upbringing to--
excuse me-- to her methods of writing.
But since Rae's poems are frequently
motored by a mistrust of categories, labels,
and functions, and by her determination
to outwit or subdue the human desire to classify,
since her poems seem to seek expansion,
I'll resist, as I talk about her writing, to make reductions.
Instead, let me tell you simply why I love this work.
What is most interesting to me about it
is that it seems to evidence a personal ethic of sincerity,
as if sincerity exists on some absolute plane
where it can be discovered and harnessed.
Rae's writing reveals a deeper commitment
to engage what is genuine.
In fact, it seems she's on a mission to get at essence,
meanwhile entertaining the notion that such a thing may
not even exist.
This is perhaps the root of why her poems are difficult.
And this is an ironic, appropriate, and perhaps
destined mission, actually, given
that aforementioned upbringing.
"Doubleness is the essence of consciousness,"
she once said in an interview.
"And when names perform a function, that's fiction,"
she wrote in a poem called A Story.
This can be an entry point into Rae's work.
Impatient with what is not authentic,
determined to discover and allow dissonance,
the poems never become didactic because there's always
an awareness not only of the limitations of words
and their liabilities, but of human limitation.
I'll just read a couple of lines of her poem, Parse,
to illustrate what I'm trying to say here.
"Tongues tapping the roofs of our own mouths to make meaning.
Then God diddles us with this sunset, its pale pinks
and tender blues.
This one two rinse reminds us of something,
if only our own depth of feeling."
Like a child who's been disciplined,
but is secretly happy for the attention,
I read these kind of poems and know
that I'm being tended to, being taught,
brought along to learn stern lessons
about saying and meaning.
The old adage, say what you mean and mean what you say,
taken under her tutelage, is perhaps
a literal and achievable goal, or at least it
is a result she chases, if not a result that, by her standards,
is ever achieved in any one poem.
As critic Stephen Burt remarked, "Her poems
reject almost all the consolations we
expect literature to contain.
They do not tell us that love will endure.
They don't say that our lives can satisfy us and they never,
ever, advise us to trust our instincts."
Instead, her poems ask us to see.
It's as if this poet is constantly adjusting
her reader's prescription, shifting the lenses in front
of our eyes to give us another, and then another,
look at the chart.
Now, can you see?
How about now?
Except in this office, the language
can make you see two things at once.
And in this way, we see better, we see more.
This doubleness, for Rae, is a route to precision.
I appreciate the sort of Daoist weft that binds the poems.
By Daoist, I mean in the sense that one thing can always stand
in for any other one thing, and those things can,
but most likely cannot, stand for God.
It's a sort of faithful atheism.
This lack of essence and this address
to a social lack of presence of mind or certainty
is everywhere in the poems.
What in this language and in this life
are you having a relationship with exactly, she
seems to be asking.
What sort of place is existence, she
writes, if we can come into it.
And this startles us as readers and reminds us exactly
of the symbiotic nature of language to being.
The poet is a demonstrator.
She reveals memetically how it is
that we miss, how we miss out, how we misappropriate,
or how we mistake what we are given.
When she uses images, they are not
employed to propel narrative or create solutions.
Instead, they work to strip our vision of its bias
and its subjectivity.
Her verse restores power to language.
Her images repair.
Her words infuse, and in many ways, add the truth.
So please help me welcome Rae Armantrout.
[APPLAUSE]