Book Review

In the twenty-four years since the publication of Veil: New and Selected Poems in 2001, Rae Armantrout has published a voluminous amount of poetry with Wesleyan University Press, including the Pulitzer-Prize-winning collection Versed  in 2010, which was also a Finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry. Go Figure is Armantrout’s twelfth collection with Wesleyan, and the poems play to the strengths of her writing: a sharp-eyed engagement with the occurrences of mundane life juxtaposed with philosophical and poetic inquiries with language packaged into aphorisms, slivers of imagery, and brief narratives that resist closure. Disjunctions and unexpected associations proliferate in these poems as Armantrout navigates life with her extended family (two growing babies make appearances throughout the book) while considering technological concerns, animals and the natural world, and the politically and ecologically dubious state of the world. If each new collection that Armantrout publishes can feel like an exercise in formal repetition, the repetition is welcome. Armantrout’s consistent use of a form she has honed across decades allows her to sustain multiple simultaneous lines of inquiry, teasing connections between facts and ideas without ever quite providing resolution and signification. And the poems are better off for it.

Frequent readers of Armantrout’s poetry will be familiar with the structure of these poems: long, thin strands that cling to the left margin and are frequently divided up into numbered sections or split apart by long dashes that separate sections. A representative poem, “At the Moment,” occurs early in the book, and I will quote it in full:

I need a moment,

a taut, equivocal

poem,

another

chance to practice

my balance,

one foot

against my inner knee

and both arms out.

— – —

Sun still

on the wisteria.

The question is

how still.

Now hop!

The separation of the poem into two distinct sections invites connection or comparison, but none is immediately apparent, as the concept of balance does not explicitly transfer from the poem’s first five stanzas to the final three. And the concluding line—“Now hop!”—feels separate from the preceding stanzas as if it were an instruction shouted by a boot-camp sergeant or a line borrowed from a children’s book.

In line with this observation, the affect of juxtaposition saturates most poems in the collection. Ostensibly unrelated topics and unexpected observations collide and radiate shockwaves as if each poem’s disjunctive fixations were tectonic plates slamming together on the page. The poems feel intentionally centerless and playfully mix registers of language, resisting the complacency that often comes with a singularity of voice and a linear progression of thoughts. In Go Figure, Armantrout routinely interpolates abstraction and concretion while giving her poems a lived-in, inhabited feeling. Language never finds itself subordinated to other language; Armantrout keeps a level playing field. To illustrate: In the poem “Simply,” Armantrout moves from discussing theoretical histories of human biology (“Our earliest ancestors / were accelerants. // They ate change.”) to giving deliberately muddled insights on poetic language. In an apparent non sequitur anticipating Armantrout’s fixation on the language of early childhood, the poem ends with an incomplete nursery rhyme: “Your house is on fire / Your children”.

Throughout Go Figure, Armantrout’s dominant aesthetic is the specificity of the poems’ rapidly shifting attention and the abrupt juxtapositions that result: Where her eye and ear rests and what (or whose) language she allows into each line can change without warning, giving poems a deliberately scattered and cobbled-together aesthetic. In poems like “At the Moment,” that laser-focused attentiveness moves from a discussion of balancing on one foot (the act of existing in a space is compared to the space of a poem) to a description of sunlight on vines. The poems seldom conclude or revolve around a semantic center in a way that feels daring and contemporary.

Complementing her poetics of attention and receptiveness, Armantrout frequently refers to two young girls whose irreverent interests and bursts of language bring vibrancy to the poems in Go Figure. For instance, late in the collection in a poem titled “Overthink,” we find a snippet of overheard child-speech:

“Eleven minutes ago

we went to the tummy store.”

The little girl gestures

as if moving hangers

                                                            sideways

The girls haunt the poems like playful sprites, jarring, unsettling, and provoking the poems’ otherwise mature language, and the girls’ simplistic yet evocative speech serves as a stimulating counterpoint to Armantrout’s other linguistic registers.

Language itself takes center stage in the collection, as Armantrout continues to engage with her Bay Area LANGUAGE-writing roots. The slips between categories of language and the juxtaposition of speech and writing allow each poem to gesture towards linguistic and semantic correspondences without sinking into closure. The feedback loop of meaning remains open, as in the poem “After,” where Armantrout writes:

Fern shapes will be formed

by retreating waves.

Clouds will feather and branch.

No matter what is dead,

they will correspond.

— – —

No matter what has died

clouds will bud

and calve—

if beauty is what matters,

there’s that.

— – —

If beauty if what matters,

we’ll enjoy it

for nothing, from nowhere,

no matter who

is gone.

The poem shifts registers after each section break, as phrases spill and slip into one another like a Slinky descending a staircase: “No matter what is dead” evolves to “No matter who has died” as the poem moves from the first to the second section. Similarly, the poem’s third section borrows the phrase “if beauty is what matters” from the second section, tweaking the context so that the poem ends with a meditative negative definition on aesthetic enjoyment. It seems that, in addition to the youthful prattle of two little girls, mortality is on Armantrout’s mind.

Poems in Go Figure see Armantrout at her most omnivorous, tackling subject matter as varied as the La Brea Tar Pits, the role of artificial intelligence in modern life, ongoing ecological crises, dental pain, California’s plant life, and the sounds and speech patterns that take up the poet’s aural attention. Throughout the decentered poems, built around askance correspondences, Armantrout plays the role of reporter, bringing half-digested facts, meditations, anxieties, and found language into her writing. As she writes in the concluding stanzas of a poem appropriately titled “Reporting,”

“Diesel keeps things

simple.”

I heard that today

in what passes

for the void.

The varied and precise language in the collection—as in the just-quoted excerpt—feels borrowed from dozens of unplaceable sources, spoken and written, as if to indicate that maintaining the trace or trail of language’s origin is less important than its insertion it into new contexts and voicings. All language, Armantrout suggests, can be redeployed as poetic language without being comfortably assimilated into the poet’s own choice of vocabulary and phrasing. And this, finally, is the brilliance of Go Figure, as the poet’s sublime receptivity blends her internal languages with those at work around her in the world, culminating in a body of work that combines lyricism with astonishing leaps in content and logic.