Up to Speed (Wesleyan Poetry Series) - Softcover

Armantrout, Rae

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0819566985 ISBN 13: 9780819566980

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 2004

Synopsis

Corrosive new poems from a poet whose work challenges expectations.

Rae Armantrout's most recent collection of poems focuses on the phenomenon of time, both as lived experience at the start of the 21st century and as a stubborn mystery confronting physicists and philosophers. The poems in this book are polyphonic: they juxtapose the discourses of science and religion, Hollywood and the occasional psychotic stranger. The title poem, which appears in Best American Poetry 2002, leads off with a "sphinx" asking "Does a road / run its whole length / at once? / Does a creature / curve to meet / itself?" Armantrout's work, with its careful syntax bordering on plain speech and meticulously scored short lines, is always struggling with the problem of consciousness, its blindspots and double-binds. The poems whirl like shifting and scattered pieces of the present moment. They attempt to "make sense" of our lives while acknowledging the depth of our self-deception and deception.

About this title

About the Author

RAE ARMANTROUT is a professor of writing in the literature department at the University of California at San Diego, and the author of eight books of poetry, including Up to Speed (2003) and Veil: New and Selected Poems (2001).

Reviews

Following her breakout Veil: New and Selected Poems (2001), Armantrout here consolidates her place as a preeminent poet of economy-in the senses of aesthetic compression, and of tracking cash's effect on brain and culture. In 42 poems of no more than two pages, carved lines progress seamlessly into stanzas spare to the point of parsimony, a rebuke of excess that expresses itself in a Roman comedy of winks and nudges: " 'Why do Princesses/ Caroline and Stephanie// always marry/ the wrong men?' " The poems relentlessly quote the celebrity gossip, Madison Avenue-like inanities and cable news hype to which much "ordinary" conversation has been reduced, focusing in on the barbiturate effects of repetitions and banal generalizations that preclude real exchange: " 'I don't need to see the rest' I say./ 'I can assume redundancy.' " Yet while she is certainly a major satirist, Armantrout cannot be reduced to a set of zingers. The opening syllogism of "Upper World" ("If sadness/ is akin to patience,// we're back!") reveals the real despair produced by empty language, and proceeds to an understated litany of loss: "No more wishes.// No more bungalows/ behind car-washes/ painted the color of/ swimming pools." Despite the wryness, the speaker of these poems is not so much pointing fingers as trying to point out what it is that makes people adopt language like " 'Don't let the car fool you.// My treasure/ is in heaven.' " In doing so, these cryptic, probing poems are a national treasure, bringing readers up to speed on the "reiterative/ noodling/ in absentia" in which lives are expended.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0819566985
• ISBN 13: 9780819566980
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80