Rae Armantrout Quotes

• The crowd is made of little gods, and there is still no heaven.

  Rae Armantrout

  Heaven, Crowds, Littles

  Rae Armantrout (2016). “Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001–2015”, p.79, Wesleyan University Press

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• As for the differences between audio and the printed page, the sonic aspects of poetry are important to me. I read my poems aloud to myself as I'm composing them. And I enjoy reading to an audience. I think people get tone more easily when they hear a writer read her work. Some people have told me they hear more humor in my poems at a live reading than when they see them on the page. I think that may be a matter of pacing. On the other hand, I've listened to a lot of poetry readings and I know how much you can miss. If you stop to really register one line, you miss the next three or so.

  Rae Armantrout

  Reading, Thinking, People

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Poetry wants to make things mean more than they mean, says someone, as if we knew how much things meant, and in what unit of measure.

  Rae Armantrout

  Mean, Want, Units

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• Metaphor is ritual sacrifice. It kills the look-alike. No, metaphor is homeopathy.

  Rae Armantrout

  Sacrifice, Looks, Metaphor

  Rae Armantrout (2010). “Versed”, p.93, Wesleyan University Press

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• I am attracted to looking at the different things language can mean even in one sometimes quite ordinary utterance. Writing is partly about listening closely to yourself as you think or compose and being aware of the different tensions and weights among the words, the different directions any one of them could lead. I like to play with the multiplicity and instability of meaning partly out of a sense of adventure, to see where that takes me and partly in a whistling past the graveyard kind of way because, of course, sensing stable meaning fall away can be scary.

  Rae Armantrout

  Fall, Adventure, Mean

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I tend to like the way poets form communities. Writing can be lonely after all. Modern life can be lonely. Poets do seem to be more social than fiction writers. This could be because of poetry's roots in the oral tradition - poetry is read aloud and even performed. I'm just speculating, of course. At any rate, because poets form these groups, they learn from one another. That is one of the best things about being a poet.

  Rae Armantrout

  Lonely, Writing, Community

  Source: therumpus.net

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• The fear that all this will end. The fear that it won't.

  Rae Armantrout

  Ends

  Rae Armantrout (2016). “Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001–2015”, p.144, Wesleyan University Press

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• But here I hold your dream in my poem.

  Rae Armantrout

  Dream, Your Dreams

  Rae Armantrout (2009). “Versed”, p.83, Wesleyan University Press

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• Curled up in bed,
  I’m young
  in the old way.

  Rae Armantrout

  Bed, Way, Young

  Rae Armantrout (2015). “Itself”, p.49, Wesleyan University Press

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• We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.

  Rae Armantrout

  Mean, Half, Discourse

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• Like all my poems, 'Negotiations' has several sources. It deals with aging lovers and the often silent deals they make. Thinking about bargains made me think of The Little Mermaid and that made me remember something I had just read about the incredibly complex process by which tadpoles (actual little mermaids) are somehow able to reabsorb their tails and fashion their future frog legs.

  Rae Armantrout

  Fashion, Thinking, Mermaid

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• Poets tend to form loose groups - the "Romantics" or the "Imagists". And sometimes they write manifestoes in the name of these groups. This can be good. It forces the poet and the audience to think. But it can also be dangerous. It can turn into a branding device so that potential readers believe they know all they need to know once they know you've been associated with a certain group or position. It can freeze things in place. That's where thinking stops.

  Rae Armantrout

  Believe, Writing, Thinking

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I know you by your willingness.

  Rae Armantrout

  Knows, Willingness

  Rae Armantrout (2010). “Versed”, p.54, Wesleyan University Press

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• clarity need not be equivalent to / readability. How readable is the world?

  Rae Armantrout

  Poetry, Needs, World

  Rae Armantrout (2007). “Collected Prose”

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• This is a strange book: visionary and dark. It stutters out a kind of music: repeated phrases which accumulate errors and mutate as they go like chromosomes or, as Woodward puts it better, 'visible fissile ribbons.' It's as if we were present for the moments of creation and extinction. Uncanny Valley is ominous and beautiful.

  Rae Armantrout

  Beautiful, Book, Dark

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• The future is all around here.' It's a place, anyplace where we don't exist.

  Rae Armantrout

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• We sleep together in the dark but confuse light with love.

  Rae Armantrout

  Sleep, Dark, Light

  Rae Armantrout (2010). “Versed”, p.103, Wesleyan University Press

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• Carried by light, images remain while sensation is so evanescent as to be always beyond belief.

  Rae Armantrout

  Light, Belief, Sensations

  Rae Armantrout (2010). “Versed”, p.11, Wesleyan University Press

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• The ghosts swarm. They speak as one person. Each has left something undone.

  Rae Armantrout

  Ghost, Speak, Undone

  Rae Armantrout (2009). “Versed”, p.70, Wesleyan University Press

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• Like most of my poems, 'Lie' has several sources: I read a very troubling book called The Sixth Extinction. I took note of the way people, including me, enjoy talking knowledgeably about how the world will end. I drove to Tucson and saw the desert flowering on either side of the road. And I glanced at my spam to see what people wanted to sell me these days.

  Rae Armantrout

  Lying, Book, Talking

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• Thus drivers inching southward will see the phalanx of birds heading west as one spontaneous gesture.

  Rae Armantrout

  Bird, Gestures, West

  Rae Armantrout (2009). “Versed”, p.97, Wesleyan University Press

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• People probably long for something genuinely personal in a society where the personal is often indistinguishable from the "personalized." Maybe the poetry audience member is searching for his or her own "personal space" and they expect the poet to be a sort of avatar of the private life. But that sort of representation is distasteful to me. Asking a poet to represent the personal life is, paradoxically, to turn the poet into something other than a person.

  Rae Armantrout

  Long, People, Poet

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Lily Brown writes with and against things in poems that are coiled up tight as springs (or snakes). A believer in the power of the line, she writes, 'I think the plastics/and sink them' then 'Where is the sand/man hiding the dirt.' These terse, biting poems will make you look around and wonder.

  Rae Armantrout

  Spring, Writing, Men

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