"Next Life" by Rae Armantrout

Next Life, Rae Armentrout (Wesylan).  

Rae Armantrout is a poet of intensely private language whose seeming fragments of sentences, scenes, and interior recollections still read vividly, provocatively. A member of the Language group of poets whose other members include Ron Silliman, Bob Perleman and Lynn Hejinian, among other notables, she has distinguished herself from the frequently discursive style that interrogates the boundaries between the nominal power of language and the contradictions that result when conventional meaning rubs against insoluble fact, Armantrout's poetry is brief, terser, more taciturn and pared to the essential terms and the sensations they conflate. More autobiographical, perhaps, more concerned with raising a sense of genuine autonomy from the words one employs to define direction and purpose, Armantrout's poetry is an ongoing inquiry about what lies beyond our expectations once they've been given the lie. As in this fine collection's title, what is the "Next Life"? What she leaves out is fully formed by its absence; 

 

We wake up to an empty room addressing itself in scare quotes. "Happen" and "now" have been smuggled out to arrive safely in the past tense. We come home to a cat made entirely of fish. --"Reversible" 

A good many poets lavish their subjects with an overflow of language that twists and turns and deliberately problematizes syntax to achieve effects that are more stunts than perception or even an interrogation of an elusive notion. Armantrout's poetry is strong, stoic, lean to the degree that what remains are the resonances of a personality witnessing the truth when internal idealism and material fact don't compliment each other. Armantrout's poetry is a calm voice intoning over the varied scraps and arcana of experience and crisply discovers, underlines, and speaks with a curt irony. There are things we've said we were, there are the things we've become, and there are the words we first used to make our declarations asserted again, though mutated, altered, given a few shades of new meaning to meet the demands of a life that becomes more complicated with small, distracting matters. There's a blunted, occasionally jagged feeling to Armantrout's lines, a cadence that will alternate between the intricate, acute image, half-uttered phrases that seem like mumbles, and the juxtapositions of word and deed that expose an archive of deferred emotion. 

 1. "That's a nice red," you said, but now the world was different so that I agreed with a puzzled or sentimental certainty as if clairvoyance could be extended to the past. And why not? With a model sailing ship in the window of a little, neat house and with a statuette of an stable boy on the porch, holding a lamp up,  someone was making something clear-- perhaps that motion is a real character. 2. How should we feel about "the eraser"? "Rampages" wears one expression while "frantically" wears another: conjoined twins, miraculously separated on Judgement Day? Then "only nothingness" is a bit vague. But words are more precise than sight-- increasingly! 3. The old man shuffles very slowly, not between a crosswalk's white lines but down one of them. Like a figure in a dream, his relations to meaning is ominous.-- --

"Agreement" 

 These are voices of a consciousness that surveys several things at once; time is collapsed, details are suggested, associative leaps abound, and the phrase is terse, problematic. Above all, this is a poetry of concentrated power; what is spoken here, the dissonance between expectation and the manner of how perception changes when idealism greets actual events and deeds, are the things one considers late at night when there's nothing on cable, you've read your books, and only a pen and paper remains; what of me remains in the interactions, the negotiations, the compromises that constitute "making my way" in the world we might inhabit? This is a city of comings and goings, of people and their associations dancing and struggling with the invisible forces of repulsion and attraction; one seeks to transcend what it is that surrounds them, but find that their autonomy is merely a fiction shared only with the self when a community is lacking to applaud or argue with one's declarations of self. Armantrout gets to that minor and hardly investigated phenomenon of how all of us--as readers, writers, consumers, family members--create our dissonances in a manner that is intractable and ingrained. This is a fine, spare, ruminative volume by a singular writer.

Barry Goldensohn stops traffic

Barry Goldensohn is a poet of stylistic conflicts, one part a gifted lyricist who can raise a subject to a higher level--he can almost persuade you that so much does depend on matters, materials and emotions so small--and the other someone who loses their way in tangled intersections of language where metaphor alone does not suffice for effect. The downside of his work is that he often talks more than he ought to. He sinks his poems into odd arrangements of phrase that mark someone who is attempting to be original, memorable; I understand the attempt, but the mistake , I think, is the use of more words rather than accurate words. By "accurate" I mean the construction of images that are at least convincing of both situation and inspiration that would result in a stanza that becomes quotable, something that makes you stop and read the line again.Goldensohn's worst habits cause me to stop at his most glaring coinages.

In "Dissolving", a soul of "dangerous weight" enters the lake waters and experiences something akin to a weightlessness that suggests the burden of gravity has been removed as his girth displaces the water line ,if only a little. Anyone of us might have compared this description to a retrun to the womb, the legendary desire embedded in the lowest recesses of the male brain that wants to escape obligation and engagement, but the poet moves to move beyond the cliche by positing this awkward idea:

he swims
on his back in the female receptive position,A genuine conversation stoppr, this image.This is as awful a line as I've ever read in a poem by an established poet, it being silly, presumptive, altogether unevocative of anything he was trying about in this poem. There's a tinge of hubris , to my thinking, that a male can find an ingenious trope through which to draw a comparison between a woman's position in conceptionizing lovemaking and overweight male's sense of being liberated from his earthly bonds. Had this been Lawrence, the trope would be animated, passionate, full of bitter sweat, sores and a heart-racing ache that would imply that man and woman were changed and for a moment interchangeable during their coupling. This does none of that, and exploring a nervously mentioned notion within a larger narrative bracket wasn't Goldensohn's intent; let's grant him that. But while poetry isn't obliged to adhere to vetted facts, credibility is still the point. What sounds clumsy or dashed off stops the reader's investigation. But he makes matters worse; Goldensohn is a smart man and needed a space within this short poem to demonstrate his ability to riff along in excess of the need.

thin clouds
vaporizing fast in the sun's brilliance
with the water beneath him penetrated by light
and substanceless as air and he afloat
in nothing, one with the water and air and light
and the purposeful seeming union of atoms
producing a mind digesting meanings
like a ruminant disgorging from stomach to stomach
the sobbing face on the stair,


This does not sound natural in any sense--it neither convinces that this is something either seen or experienced first hand, but it does make you think of a conceit someone comes up with and works overly hard to make it fit.It's a unfortunate symptom too prevelant in this time-crowding era, that of a poet trying to have an experience. At best this sounds like an ad libbed pitch for a movie an erstwhile screenwriter might convince a studio to finance; the wouldn't such a bad thing, of course, since various ways of condensing narrative can be artful. Goldensohn, though, gums it up by thinking too much. Perhaps it might have worked even as a contrived situation, but what Goldensohn ought to done is to have considered shoring up his William Carlos Williams influence and edging away from the association-packed candenzas that hightlight A.R.Ammons orAlbert Goldbarth; those guys have a gift for the intellective improvisation from the conveyed image. Their insertions do not stop the traffic.

God as Hamlet

The stark differences in God's persona between Old and New Testaments had changed his mind as to what to do with the world he created, and it's reasonable to think of him as a Deity who is constantly changing, evolving. Otherwise we'd have a God who is static and incapable of changing; he'd be someone who'd be incapable of dealing with an continually unfolding cosmos which he put in motion in the first place. The Prime Mover, I'd think, must by definition be able to move again, and yet again, as needed , as his vast mind assesses, discerns and decides.

Process Theology, put forth by Alfred North Whitehead and others, deals with a bit of this, as does Norman Mailer in most of his writings, most recently in his dialogue with Michael Lennon, On God. God is a creator , small "c", in the sense of the artist, continuously involved with their process as they investigate the further reaches of their muse.

New forms are created from old parts, and not everything is a success, and yet everything is a needed aspect of a life that is fully engaged in a struggle against an all -defeating death. Things wouldn't just be moot, in the popular sense, they would stop being things at all. It may be a mistake to think of God as omnipotent ; if we are made in his likeness then our weaknesses are his as well, and this gives a vital clue that God is less than all-powerful and that he doesn't know the outcome of each and every matter before him. It's an attractive notion that God remains teachable by the very things he creates. There's a reason that it's written that God blessed/cursed man with Free Will, but I'm hesitant to say what that is. It has to be more than a curse he engineered in us all to cause us to stray from a path of righteousness.

Being Omnipotent and A Supreme Being, I would think, implies that there's more for a Deity to do than create Heaven and Earth and treat his subjects on the one inhabitable planet in the solar system as if the whole guise of existence is a reality show, everyone one of us literally, in some sense, waiting to see who gets "voted off the island". Or worse. I would assume that we are possessed with this cumbersome element because it is also in God's nature to choose to one thing, or several things, as opposed to doing one or several things to the contrary. And, of course, he could also do nothing and instead wallow and abstract about all the things he might do when his calendar clears , that is, procrastinate. This might be the reason for the lack of witnessed divine interventions in large public places since the Bible was gathered and codified as Church doctrine. In is image, we are ambivalent and decide on the basis of what crisis is most immediate I actually believe that FW is central to his Divinity, in the sense that he could choose to battle his creative power and simply do nothing.

The existential nature of God, though, would become bored and ill-tempered simply existing in a vacuum, and so he decided to create meaning for himself, much as we do in this realm. Free will is that thing that allows us to associate together and determine and define right and wrong, good and evil, and it is also that inspire given instinct, I believe, to empower us to fight the baser desires and instincts.

Kicking Mailer When He's Dead

It's time, I think, that the amorphous reading mob called call "we" slide past hurt feelings and admit that the late Norman Mailer did write more than a few books where talent outshone excess and ego. In my mind, anyway, and you can read my various pieces on Mailer's career and work in this blog's archive. His enemies, though, won't his credit for composing anything of worth than The Naked and the Dead, and lately, there is a buzz that it was a fluke, or, as Gore Vidal wrote, "a fake". Sour grapes, it seems. Sometimes the name doesn't have to be mentioned at all, as some dedicated haters will just dump a smoothly honed rendition of Mailer's sixty years of negative press in a belated effort to get their licks in. Norman Mailer cultivated turmoil and controversy with the publication of his 1959 combined memoir essay anthology Advertisements for Myself, where he declared, on the first page, in the first paragraph,

The sour truth is that I am imprisoned with a perception that will settle for nothing less than making a revolution in the consciousness of our time. Whether rightly or wrongly, it is then obvious that I would go so far as to think it is my present and future work which will have the deepest influence of any work being done by an American novelist in these years. I could be wrong, and if I am, then I’m the fool who will pay the bill, but I think we can all agree it would cheat this collection of its true interest to present myself as more modest than I am.

No one was better on the subject of his own vanity and the presumptions of what his talent could do than Mailer himself, and very few others, even the most conceited of our best and worst scribes, were willing to go as far as admit that they wanted to change the world through their art. Only Ayn Rand comes close, I think, but the difference was that Mailer was an artist above all else, with an artist's inclination to follow a whim. Rand, locked into a philosophy cobbled together from misreadings of Plato and Nietzsche, couldn't break from her self-constructed jail of doggerel and dogma; Mailer strayed in interesting, sometimes illuminating ways, his vanity in tow, willing to be a clown, if need be, to produce the book, to advance to the next project. He had bills to pay. Conservative literature czar Roger Kimball blogged an extensive litany of Mailer's infamous deeds, and offered an acidic view of his major works; the essay, though, went online so soon after Mailer's death that one can't help but wonder if Kimball had it sit laying in a drawer, figuratively speaking, waiting for years for the author to pass on. It does read like a jealously kept collection of evidence Roger was saving so he could cast a definitive and finalizing negative assessment. I should mention, though, that a few days later the site, Pajamas Media, published a more balanced overview of Mailer's career by Peter Freeman who, though appalled by Mailer's antics, admitted that the wildman was still an artist and was capable of finely crafted writing. Good for them, for once. Those like me desiring lengthy evaluations that make the case for the overall success of Mailer's odd genius can find solace in Lee Siegel's critical summary of his work in the New York Times Book Review when he reviewed Mailer's final novel The Castle in the Forest. It's a smart fit, as Siegel, like Mailer, is something of a blowhard and in love with his own intelligence; all the same, again like Mailer, the man is smart and has the right take on what the novelist was up to with his practiced exhibitionism.

The latest instance is from Commentary Magazine; basically a compendium of the lowlife's of Mailer's public career, the piece declares, for the most part, that Mailer's body of work was, in its entirety, dull, the prolix vaporing of a delusional fool. The level of gossipy slander is high, and no real argument is made as to why Mailer's books, pace Naked and the Dead, are dead on arrival. Consider the source; Norman Podhoretz is still trying to settle scores. That his publication is arguing with a dead man heightens Mailer's value. I don't doubt many work boring, but I think it's more to do with your taste rather than with the late author's writing. Writers who are boring, dull, lacking ideas, verve and are unable to make themselves more captivating generally don't spend six decades in the spotlight of contemporary American literature, as Mailer had. Not that there's a consensus on his work and life; fierce debates about his books have been raging nearly as long as he's been a public figure. This nearly sixty years of contention by critics and readers, yay and nay, is not the mark of a boring writer. Boring writers are ignored and go unread. Mailer, to say the least, you paid attention to. I would reject is an all-encompassing pronouncement that Mailer is an awful writer, or that the majority of his work is dreadful and merely the extensions of a large, unclued ego. The fun in all this, though, is contrasting one's peculiar justifications for enjoying or disliking a writer (or filmmaker, poet, painter) and seeing what responses come forth that think differently.

There is something to be said about Mailer being the second hand and slap-dashed in his writings--I'm thinking of his foghorning pomp on the state of American theatre in his introduction to his play version of The Deer Park, his glorification of juvenile delinquency and his homophobic mewling in Advertisements for Myself -- but he did, for me, rise above was mere petulance and high octane assholism in his writing, which is to say in his thinking, that he kept me interested over the course of forty plus years of reading him. Of a Fire on the Moon, Harlot's Ghost and Why Are We in Viet Nam are written in three distinct styles, with varying dictions and pitches. It was a large plus in Mailer's column that he varied his tone to do the best service to a story. As much as one admired and even envied the rolling cadences and chain-reaction like flurry of metaphors of the style that characterized, his richest period, the sixties through the seventies, one had to find relief that the author himself seemed to have grown bored with addressing himself in the third person and proselytizing in a high rhetoric.

The briefer sentences, the barren, stark voice, the uninflected hiss of the language was the perfect foil for The Executioner's Song. He was not the perfect writer, but from the excess of his self-promotions and cracker barrel prophecies comes a voice unlike any other, and a voice as well with sufficient mastery to have produced a handful of masterpieces as well as a selection of egocentric subject groping. These are the works that Mailer partisans will have to contend transcend the late author's feuds, fights, wife stabbings, drinking sprees, and divorces. The hope is that his reputation as a writer catches his notoriety as a professional jerk.

EILEEN MILES AT DG WILLS BOOKS TONIGHT

www.dgwillsbooks.com

Death may be your Santa Claus

We get older, our joints ache, our blood pressure rises,we bore ourselves with our jokes and our set platitudes said to friends who are having a sorry time of it . We tire of being responsibility for other people's feelings, we weary of repeating ourselves again to the same people the same things. We want to be done with our pains, our complaints, the sounds of our own voices venting our regrets and resentments: sometimes we just want it all to end. But most of us do nothing to abort our transactions with the inane and the repetitive--we shoulder our burden, we cram our misgivings into a burlap sack, we continue to live for the next five minutes of happiness all this breathing and work schedules too infrequently results in. But still others of us want it to stop, all this obligation, this drudgery, this loss of interest in the vitalism they used to see at the core of their community, their jobs, their jobs: one finds themselves living by rote to forgotten rules and the awareness of the inability to forge a new path , an improved outlook, a fresh perspective causes one to dwell on the idea of escape, the permanent solution to the consequences life in the big city. You just envy the dead their peace, you become romantic for the one thing that is, indeed, forever and unchanging.

Trapeze
Deborah Digges


See how the first dark takes the city in its arms
and carries it into what yesterday we called the future.


O, the dying are such acrobats.
Here you must take a boat from one day to the next,

or clutch the girders of the bridge, hand over hand.
But they are sailing like a pendulum between eternity and evening,

diving, recovering, balancing the air.
Who can tell at this hour seabirds from starlings,

wind from revolving doors or currents off the river.
Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher.

Don't call them back, don't call them in for supper.
See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky.

This hit me like a sock in the jaw--it seems to get the mood of a writer who has an intense sense of that all manner of gravity, both natural and moral, has ceased to exist that the material world and the conduct of the population was now free to play, wander , roam, let themselves go into a an vertiginous , all embrace void. These very much resembles Yeats, and the ringing rhetorical and hard edged images resound like "Easter 1916". The difference between the two, of course, is that Yeats' poem was a prophecy, and his poem was apprehensive because everything old was being made new with new uses, new meanings, remolded from a new philosophy. Terrible in the unknown and beautiful in the sense that life processes cannot be stopped, only made into something new , different. Digges gives the feeling of the floor, the sidewalk, the street giving way from under you , that the conditions of conduct are suspended or revoked outright, and that the life goes to an inevitable, ecstatic end.

Some are as children on swings pumping higher and higher.


Don't call them back, don't call them in for supper.
See, they leave scuff marks like jet trails on the sky.

These last lines get the pitch exactly, the pull toward a personal apocalypse being so strong that the bounds of reason, protocol, faith are undone. It's a seduction to the darkest yearning, to enter a sphere where there is no contradiction, no agitation, no weighted arguments with the balance of one's universe. To become nothing. It's a plea, as well, for the families, the friends, the passers by to cease heroic efforts to prevent the inevitable and accept one's decision to be raptured.The nihilistic lure is overpowering here, and one is made to feel that there is nothing for this speaker to do but to surrender to natural forces, to embrace the inevitable end.


What gets me in the poem is how it makes the Big Sleep, the Large Nod, the Humongous Nap an attractive state; life consists mostly of temporary problems requiring our wits and ingenuity with which to engineer remedies. It's a wearying task as the years go on, and Digges , it seems to me, writes from a point of view of someone approaching their nadir, the breaking point when what passes for ironic disengagement, the activity of minimizing one's labors in just getting through the day, becomes an encroaching obsession for a permanent solution . The narrator seems envious of the dead, as you say, but I think there's a real desire here to leave this sphere of being. The weightlessness and unboundedness of the dead suggests desire, a deferred longing . The narrator sounds like she is desirous of what the dead get to do in the universe as we understand it, which is nothing. The desire is to do nothing and to be nothing in turn.The foreknowledge that every living thing dies finally crowds the poem like a Bosch painting--one last intense set of indulgences of the human senses, and then ride the sensual tide to a darkness one cannot report back from. This is beautiful, unnerving, slightly scary.

Reading about the yearning for death, though, can be worrisome in itself, and Kim Addonizio provides a proper antidote with this piece:

WHAT THE DEAD FEAR
by Kim Addonizio

On winter nights, the dead
see their photographs slipped
from the windows of wallets,
their letters stuffed in a box
with the clothes for Goodwill.
No one remembers their jokes,
their nervous habits, their dread
of enclosed places.
In these nightmares, the dead feel
the soft nub of the eraser
lightening their bones. They wake up
in a panic, go for a glass of milk
and see the moon, the fresh snow,
the stripped trees.
Maybe they fix a turkey sandwich,
or watch the patterns on the TV.
It’s all a dream anyway.
In a few months
they’ll turn the clocks ahead,
and when they sleep they’ll know the living
are grieving for them, unbearably lonely
and indifferent to beauty. On these nights
the dead feel better. They rise
in the morning refreshed, and when the cut
flowers are laid before their names
they smile like shy brides. Thank you,
thank you, they say. You shouldn’t have,
they say, but very softly, so it sounds
like the wind, like nothing human.

This is a is a sharp and funny rebuttal to the late Digges' poem. Unlike the narrator in "Trapeze", who all but says she envies the dead their inertia and seeming serenity, Addonizio's poem tells of us spectral traces of formerly corporeal beings who cannot severe their link with the physical world. It's funny in an odd way, as it mirrors the vanity of the living's obsession over status and the fear of not getting what they desire or losing what they think they have. Addonizio's point, after her brisk and crosscutting descriptions of spirits contending with various dis-pleasures and discomforts, is that we should make our peace before our time comes; otherwise the anxieties will follow us in the crossing over to the other side and cause us to stall before we reach the place of fabled Eternal Rest. It seems Addonizio sees this state analogous to being stuck at the starkest intersection for all time. A drag.

jim carroll is dead

eventually you roll up your sleeves
after you arise from the nod
to notice
the back of your shirt is covered
in grass stains and
small twigs
the shape of crucifixes.

there's another song
these fingers will manage
as nicotine tips strike
keys that click
and snap another
name that
occurs to you
when the morning sun
is right where you like it,
in your eyes,white and intense.

the name rhymes with
the things
you've done
and the things
that became broken
as you past through
court yards and gymnasiums
trying to keep your balance.

the name
sinks like a rock
to the center
of your dreams
where you are leaning
against a rock
nodding to the lines
the poet grunts
as he comes clean
with nick names
and a drum stick or two.

you look down
and see yourself
on the floor
not moving nor breathing
and look
to the page
you were trying to fill,

it is empty
as the air
between the words "I love you".

you return to the floor
to the floor,
reach for your heart
leave your hand
flat,

and then die.
-9-14-09