Versed (Wesleyan Poetry Series) [Hardcover]

Rae Armantrout (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 3, 2009 | Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series

Rae Armantrout has always organized her collections of poetry as though they were works in themselves. Versed brings two of these sequences together, offering readers an expanded view of the arc of her writing. The poems in the first section, Versed, play with vice and versa, the perversity of human consciousness. They flirt with error and delusion, skating on a thin ice that inevitably cracks: "Metaphor forms / a crust / beneath which / the crevasse of each experience." Dark Matter, the second section, alludes to more than the unseen substance thought to make up the majority of mass in the universe. The invisible and unknowable are confronted directly as Armantrout's experience with cancer marks these poems with a new austerity, shot through with her signature wit and stark unsentimental thinking. Together, the poems of Versed part us from our assumptions about reality, revealing the gaps and fissures in our emotional and linguistic constructs, showing us ourselves where we are most exposed.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. In recent years, Armantrout's reputation has soared—she began in the '70s as an obscure, early practitioner of language poetry, and now her poems regularly appear in the New Yorker. Her new book comprises two sequences—Versed and Dark Matter—of loosely interlinked poems dealing with the prolific poet's usual subjects (the body, contemporary society, violence) as well as more personal explorations of illness and mortality, all relayed in Armantrout's concentrated, crystalline voice, with a predilection for skipping some steps along the way to sense. The first sequence, peppered with pop culture references and quoted speech, features silly yet surprisingly serious poems on topics like '[b]reaking/ Anna Nicole news// as she buries/ her son.' In the playful Scumble, the poet speculates as to What if I were turned on by seemingly innocent words/ such as... 'extrapolate?' The second section, Dark Matter, is evasively intimate and occasionally, albeit characteristically, bleak, as Armantrout (Next Life) contemplates her own struggle with cancer with a shocked smile,/ while an undiscovered tumor/squats on her kidney. In what may be moments of intense, sardonic honesty—Chuck and I are pleased/ to have found a spot/where my ashes can be scattered—the poet poses metaphysical questions with open endings: jarring moments in which the stakes are suddenly, impossibly high. (Feb.)
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Review

"Trying to read a book by Rae Armantrout in a single sitting is like trying to drink a bowl of diamonds. What's inside is all so shiny & clear & even tiny that it appears perfectly do-able. But the stones are so hard & their edges so chiseled that the instant you begin they'll start to rip your insides apart."--Ron Silliman, blog

"Rae Armantrout is the most philosophical sort of poet, continually seeking in her collections to summon and surmise the contemporary character of subjective experience and, further, to test the limits of knowledge. ... Armantrout's writing in her latest volume, Versed, will thus be familiar to her longtime readers for its way of holding meaning (and identification) in uneasy suspension. Short lines in brief poems are polyvalent in both voicing and implication, inviting multiple readings. ...yet pleasure arises in contemplating both the options and the paradox."--Tom Griffin, Bookforum

"Armantrout's poetry has always been turned to the present moment. Its formal lineage is from William Carlos Williams and the Objectivists, with their enjambments of modern experience. ... Poetically, Armantrout has always aimed at knowing life by isolating it from narrative. Written under a diagnosis of cancer ("'I just called / to fill you in'"), Versed is a major and moving addition to a life's work in many-angled reflection."--Jeremy Noel-Tod, Times Literary Supplement

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 136 pages
• Publisher: Wesleyan; 1St Edition edition (February 3, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0819568791
• ISBN-13: 978-0819568793
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #440,911 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Over my Head, June 13, 2010

By 

Amy Henry (Nipomo, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Versed (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)

National Book Award Finalist
2010 Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry



Versed by Rae Armantrout made me feel pretty ignorant (more than usual anyway!). I know that her work has always been highly respected, but when I first picked it up, I just didn't get it. A few phrases, here and there, would resonate, but then the lines would go off the track I imagined they were on. I'm fine with stream-of-consciousness writing, but that doesn't describe it either. Quite simply, I was lost. I put the collection down to return to another time.

In the meantime, The New Yorker had an article about Armantrout's winning the Pulitzer Prize for this collection, and explained in length not just her biography but her status as a Language poet. Language poets were once a cultural rebellion against Post- Modern poets, but have now become more mainstream, and of them, she's known as the best. The essay explained how her poems are often cryptic with double meanings and turns that are meant to wake up the reader, to shock them out of numb reality.

With this in mind, I went back and reread each piece. I confess that most are still over my head, I can't make the connections. But a few really did give me pause. And I think that is how she should be read: not in a hurry to finish but to slowly unravel.

From Outer:

"I'm the one who can't know if the scraggly old woman putting a gallon of vodka in her shopping cart feels guilty, defiant, or even glamorous as she does so. She may imagine herself as an actress playing an alcoholic in a film.


Removal activates glamour?

To see yourself as if from the outside - though not as others see you."

All in all, trying to figure out the meanings was fascinating, like the first few games of Sudoku. But after awhile, just as Sudoku gets more difficult, this felt like more work than I was willing to invest. I just don't have that in me, to understand what these mean. I am too simple for these complexities. However, someone with a stronger background in poetry, especially Language poetry, would likely enjoy this special collection.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not my cup of tea...., October 18, 2010

By 

Z. M. Ridgway (Waco, Texas United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Versed (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)

I bought this book because of its recent Pulitzer win. I had read negative reviews before purchasing it, but didn't trust them; I supposed that the commentators I had read were probably just not appreciators of contemporary verse. I can be a bit of a snob, you see; I have a strong appreciation for poetry of many sorts, and consider myself to have fairly well developed taste in modern music, art, and literature.

I must apologize to the reviewers that I took to be Philistines: having now read the book myself, like the previous reviewers of this volume I must confess myself baffled by Armantrout's "Versed."

There are moments of great poignancy here; there are a few passages of real beauty...but the majority of the volume reads like unconnected gibberish on a page. (This from an avid reader of T.S. Eliot, Joyce, Eco...) I'm told that Armantrout's work derives from Language Poetry; that the verse is often disjunct, with strange and thought-provoking transitions that require much of the reader. This I am fairly comfortable with: I have a good background in dialectics; I understand polarizations, juxtapositions, pastiche techniques, quotational devices, etc. in music....What I don't understand is this: why those words rather than others? Why are these two images juxtaposed, rather than two others? What criteria could possibly be articulated to differentiate "good" language poetry from "bad" language poetry?

It's a problem of craftsmanship: one thing that the Darmstadt festival discovered (to take a musical example) is that the more systematically and carefully a piece of serial music is generated, the more random it sounds. How could a listener tell by ear whether it's Stockhausen's latest masterpiece or some configuration of monkeys at a piano? Back to "Versed": how would I know whether what I am looking at is a masterpiece of language poetry or unrelated sentences spliced together on a page, between which I am supposed to invent connections and deep meanings?

The best word to describe my response to this volume is simply "baffled"; I would not have given the volume much consideration at all if it hadn't been given the stamp of approval by such distinguished prize-awarding committees. As it is, I have tried and tried to see this volume as the committees saw it, to find its unifying elements, its positive qualities...and I just can't get it. I am torn by contradictory feelings - that I am missing something extraordinary that would emerge from "Versed" if only I were more receptive, or applied myself better to the poems, or had more of a background in language poetry; and that it really is just "the Emperor's new verse."

13 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Structure Opposing Itself, August 18, 2010

By 

Sina Fazelpour (Toronto, Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Versed (Wesleyan Poetry Series) (Paperback)

I should admit first that my purpose is not necessarily to review "Versed" by Rae Armantrout, or her poetry in general, for that matter, since that would require an extensive structured study of her poetics. My concern is, however, to merely respond to some of the other reviews. Specifically, those reviews that complain about the collection being vague, fragmented, or, the biggest crime of all, purposeless.

One of the reviewers associates these poems with a sense of laziness, for apparently the poet did not put the effort to make the lines longer (as we often see in classical poems as they try to keep on with the rhythm and meter). I completely disagree with this point of view since if you read the poems once, with no concern of not understanding its purpose and god forbid feeling ignorant, you will realize the internal lyricism between the lines. The shortness of the lines not only does not deny the possibility of rhythm and lyricism, but they offer new possibilities, opportunities if i may call it so, of constructing the language of the poem anew by choosing the different correlations between the lines.

Yet, I don't consider this a major opposition since it is based on an (in)ability to read the poems through. The underlying cause of this, which at the same time seems to be the fundamental cause of the other oppositions as well, is the problem with the meaning. What is Rae Armantrout getting at? how does one have to make the connections between these fragments? and , ultimately, what is her purpose? And the inability to answer these questions, which by no means indicate that you have to know "all the correct answers", rather suggests that its you, the reader, who needs to retire from your laziness and actively involve with the poems.

Rae Armantrout is indeed a philosophical poet, and, in my mind, one of the greatest poets of our times in this sense. I would only mention two aspects of her poetry which makes it so scarce, and so precious at the same time. These two aspects are related to each other and may not be isolated from the entity that is her poems:

1) Rae Armantrout is interested in acquisitions. She is interested in the fundamental questions of philosophy. What is a subject? How is the subject different from an-other subject? What is the position of gender in the society? Are we all the same subjects or are we structurally the same. This is the fascinating dialectic that can be found in her thoughts. She approaches these issues through observations (experiences of life) and theory (the way we use our language to express ourselves). And if you think these are questions belonging to the past, you should re-think your idea of life. These very same questions are still being asked by the major philosophers of our time (such as Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, or Judith Butler).

2) Never does she assume the position of the all-knowing-subject herself. She proposes questions that many of us, if we become actively involved with our surroundings, would ask. She doesn't necessarily have an answer, or any answers for that matter, to her own questions, for her questions arise from not-knowing. If in classical poetry poets want to share their wisdom with the reader (even when it comes to those abstract ideas such as death or being), Armantrout on the other hand admits she knows nothing. She shares a question, whose answer may be found later, possibly by someone else other than her.

It's this latter aspect of her work which makes it especially important for me. We are so used to the position of the students whose schoolmaster so kindly transfers his/her knowledge to them that we have lost the motive to leave, even for a second, the position of a mere spectator.

Rae Armantrout speaks to the reader, not as a (platonic) schoolmaster, but she demands our active participation in these texts. She is asking us the questions she doesn't know the answer of, not to mock us or make us feel ignorant, but so that maybe through the participation of us, the readers, she would find some of her answers. And how intriguing would it be, if through this participation we, too, would realize our ignorance without feeling ashamed of it.