A Conversation over Cognac with Rae Armantrout (published in February 2011)

Originally posted February 2011

I met recently with San Diego-based poet  Rae Armantrout at the Brown Hotel lobby-bar in Louisville, KY,  on the last evening of the Louisville Conference in Literature and Culture after 1900 in late February.  We ordered two glasses Remy Martin, and I started the conversation by telling Armantrout that my graduate students from the City College of New York seminar I teach, called “American Women’s Experimental Writing,” had brought to class one of her recent poems published on the internet.  And I explained that a rather vigorous and controversial discussion had just taken place in that classroom about what that poem, called “Soft Money,” might mean.  

Rae Armantrout

Armantrout read aloud that poem, which is part of her new collection Money Shot (Wesleyan 2010) aloud.  Then, she discussed, at my request, what inspired her to write a poem I called “illusive” – that which had eluded our interpretative grasp.

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RA  I was driving along and listening to the radio, and I heard an old Duran Duran song called, “Rio Dancer.”  I might have misheard the lyrics but they went something like this:  “Her name is Rio.  She don’t need to understand.  Oh Rio Rio dancer ... “; and then something about  “the Rio Grande.”  

I got some of the imagery in “Soft Money” from that song “Rio Dancer.”  The attitude behind the song seemed objectionable, of course.  But I started to think about why that is erotic, how people eroticize – now I’m going to turn it into a cliché –  “the other.”  But there’s also this idea of the woman as someone whose both attractive but has no understanding; that she doesn’t need to understand.  

So the poem is about sexual power and sexual dynamics, in part., I suppose.  But maybe it is also about border issues, too.  And then I got into this riff that comes from Kant, the thing in itself and the thing for you – “the thing in itself” being the true essence of a thing, that we will never know because we can only know how we perceive it – that is the “thing for you.”   And then just the word “thing,” which suggested “Miss Thing,” I got into – that is gay slang for a narcissistic person.  So there’s this associational work around the word “thing” in the poem.   But overall, I don’t think “Soft Money” my most illusive  or difficult poem.  I think it has to do with this relationship between erotic desire and demeaning.”

LH  Wow.  I don’t think we knew all that from our classroom reading and interpretation.  But we knew “Soft Money” was a good poem.   And that’s something that’s so interesting about your work to me.  Your poems – most of them – hit me as so viscerally real, so witty about the “reality” we live with.  I experience them as profound, and yet I often don’t know why.  Sometimes I study the poem for awhile, and I find these puns on words that make the lines so rich.  They may, in fact be puns punning on the concept of “meaning” itself.  We are forced to ask:  Meaning... does it “mean,” what is it to mean, or is “it” (the “meaning” of the poem) just content to be?

RA  Well, that’s Archibald MacLeash – “A poem should not mean but be.” 

LH  So there is also allusion here in this illusive poem, “Soft Money.”  We see pieces of  Duran Duran, Kant, perhaps even MacLeash...

RA  ... and gay slang.

LH  Your poetry has all these various layers and dimensions.  It also seems to concern itself with physics and science.  I’ve recently been reading physics,  metaphysics, his kind of edgy physics.  I am really interested in the theories of quantum physics . . . 

RA  ... Me, too.

LH  I figured so, because so much of your work is about perception, and what makes “reality,”  and the role of the perceiver in knowing that.  Quantum physics, for example, makes us ask what actually constitutes an atom, and the particles within the atom, and how we discern what the atom is.  And it is the perceiver the decision as to what picture of “reality” to make.

RA  And it may go beyond that.  All this raises the issue of what created “reality” before there were humans to perceive.  If it takes perception to crystallize “reality” then who was the perceiver before we came along in evolution?  Before we were here?  I don’t think there is an answer to that philosophical, scientific debate.

LH I am utterly enchanted with the way you are using your love of science, as in your poem “Simple,” which you said in your reading here at the conference was dedicated to and in response to a dialogue with your son, who is a biologist.  So many of your poems are concerned with biological matter, or existence – and yet in a very playful manner.  This like many of your poems is a study in ontology and existence.  It is existential without the “seriousness,” or the formal “seriousness,” that one associates with existential questioning. 

RA  I think that the things that are the funniest are actually the things that are dead serious.  Even comedians aren’t talking about silly stuff, but things that actually hurt them; comedians are actually the most serious people who could be speaking to you.

LH I’ve always been a lover of gallows humor myself.  But here we’re talking about the way in which science has been one of the many threads running through your poetry.  Well, I’m unhappy with that word “threads”...

RA ... motifs....?

LH  Not quite ... “threads” is all right in terms of that woven aspect of textuality I’m trying to identify when I read one of your works.  Yet in the case of your poetry lines and “verses,” it’s almost like there are these little “explosions.”  There’s an explosion here, an explosion there.  Almost like those particles produced by the explosions re-merge together, and do this dazzling dance of their own.  I don’t see your poems are creating a “fabric” through “threads” ...

RA  ... No, the poems create space.

LH  Yes, the words themselves are spatialized (on the page).  How is this related to what you call the “Cheshire poetics” ... your Cheshire cat figure in your artist statement.  We are studying that artist statement you wrote, and which is published in American Women Poets of the 21st Century, in my class.   In that essay, you talk about the “slither” that is related to the Cheshire cat.  Written a few years ago, does that description still hold for the poetry you are publishing now?

RA  Yes, I’m still very interested in the sort of ... how can I say this? – the simultaneous being there and not being there, the meaning and not-meaning, which is I guess partly what I meant by “slither.”  I’m almost obsessed with double meanings and – I can’t always achieve this – but double meanings that are optical illusions.  This is going to sound cheesy.  But if you look at an image one way you see it this way, and if you look at it another you see it that way.  And you get a hinge like that, in which a word or a phrase can flip.  And if it “flips,” the poem means something different. 

I’m not saying I’m often able to achieve that.  But that sort of thing fascinates me.  And I guess I see that as this teasing spirit of the Cheshire cat.  He’s pointing both ways.  Before he disappears.

LH  Pointing ... you talked about his in the context of one of your poems read here yesterday.  That’s such a beautiful way to talk about what it is to be human.  That we human “animals” point – and that distinguishes us from other animals.

RA  That idea about pointing actually comes from some scientific studies  [elaborate here, that what distinguishes human from other animals is not just their tool making, for many animals create tools as well, but human’s ability to point]. 

 I like responding to scientific ideas, but I also like the supernatural. I get ideas about the supernatural from TV....

LH ... I was going to ask if you actually watch TV.

RA I do -- if something good is on!  For example, I like the program, “True Blood,” about this little town in the South, in which the vampires have decided to come out of the closet, with all of the metaphors that process implies.  They’ve existed all along, but they were hiding, and now there is a blood substitute they can drink so they don’t have to attack people if they don’t want to. (Turns out they still want to...)

LH So how did this program “True Blood” inspire your own work?

RA  It was part of the diversity, noire, the shape-shifter, and rival  drinking establishments.  There are all kinds of shape-shifters [HOW ARE THESE CONCEPTS BORROWED FROM THE TV SHOW AND MADE PART OF THE POEM IN QUESTION?]. There’s only a few humans in the town, and everyone else is a kind of monster.  The poem, like the program, kind of takes on a diversity that is very macabre.

LH Your interest in a program like “True Blood” and your use of its motifs in your poem is reminding me of Leslie Scalapino’s love of the film The Body Snatchers (the 1970s version with Donald Sutherland), which she wrote about in Delias Iris.  Those “body snatching” images become as a kind of story about, or metaphor for, human existence through the parable of the extra-terrestrial and extra-sensory realms.

RA Yes, I like that movie, too.  So when I read this, I sometimes get a laugh from the audience that watches “True Blood.”  But the line “Demons handle tasks ... not in the zone,” is not going back to TV, but is more about neurology.  There’s a neurological term for automatic systems in the brain that can do things for us unconsciously; they are called “demons.”

LH I didin’t know about that term. So you are shifting with that word “demons” into another language?

RA Yes, and it is becoming  another concept.

LH  So what you are sometimes doing when you write a poem is mining all these fields that are themselves “discourses,” and you bring the relics of those discourses into your structure of the poem or series of poems.  You are kind of taking concepts and their linguistic terms out of context – like a vampire perhaps, taking them over.  And the language shape-shifts in the process.

RA  In {WHICH POEDM], I move from the image of vampires to the language of medical research.  This neurology term “demons” comes from a scientific study. But as you are reading the lines of the poem, and because you’ve just heard the phrase “work force,” the reader might consider that the term “chicks” is about women.

LH  Let’s talk about another one of your books, Up to Speed, and the thematic but also rhetorical concept there of “speed,” so well evoked, by the way, in the book’s cover image .... 

RA  ... of the tracks and the boots.  That’s by Elenor Antin.  You have to look hard to see the boots....

LH I just wondered if you wanted to comment on this notion of “speed,” as a concept perhaps relating to poetry in the contemporary world.  I recently slowed down, having had a death close in the family.   I’m finding that when one slows down, the world speeding around begins to look more and more insane.  And we are all supposed to “speed” up, and up and up....

RA  ... I know.  The world appears to be getting more and more insanely hectic.  And you can get addicted to speed.

LH Yes, we’re on our phones, we’re on the internet...

RA ... and sitting at the computer we demand: what do you mean that it’s taking 10 seconds to load?  We feel like this is outrageous!  (Laughter.)

LH Well, what does this sense of speed (or not) have to do with your poetry? 

RA There’s actually a movement called Slow Poetry. I’m not a very patient person.  Even before the internet.  And I really don’t like filler.  I guess that’s why my poems come in these separate parts.  I kind of like to drop and see where I land.  See if it is interesting.  If its not, I’ll go somewhere else.

LH I would never have known that about you.  As a personality you seem patient, certainly not trying to escape to the next thing.  Although your poems are very condensed...

RA  ... I never wrote in a different way.  My first poems were very short.  What’s different about my later poems is that I started combining more elements.  But the condensed form was there from the time I was a kid.

And my husband thinks I’m impatient!

LH Another topic ... we are currently entering Women’s History Month.  Last year in March , I wrote a piece in response to your friend Ron Silliman’s blog piece on that topic.  Maybe because you won the Pulitzer prize in poetry, and the National Book Award as well, it was as if women had finally achieved the top positions in poetry.  It was as if we made it. 

 But my blog response was called, “Why I am Not Celebrating Women’s History Month.”  It was a piece that suggested that, even with all these strides toward full equality and humanity, women as artists and writers are still  mostly seen in secondary position – as if we have a way to go.  I’m now referencing the recent VIDA study about the lack of women in mainstream  magazine article publishing.  And, in the work place, there are still all these pressures on women.  We are expected to “behave,” to respond, according to a kind of package set up, by what, frankly, is still a very patriarchal series of gender roles.  

RA  Yes, I read the recent VIDA study.  Those magazines -- they are magazines edited by men.   I read an interesting comment recently that most of the female literary critics are of second generation of feminists, that there aren’t that many – or enough -- poet-critics among the younger generation.  Is that true?

LH What I’m wondering if we have discouraged young women in a way --  because we have been saying, in the first decade of our 21st century society, “This is the post-feminist era.”  We’ve been giving out the message that we’re beyond the gender drama and the dilemma it can pose women,  especially as artists, as well as intellectuals.  And perhaps many younger people do not feel they have to process those issues, which you and I had to think about, analyze, and dismantle. 

RA We all know these issues are on-going.  Women, for example, in the military – a woman there is raped, files a complaint, and then is fired for speaking up. 

The feminist idea that one should not be judged by one’s appearance as a woman – that’s really also been lost.  There is this consciousness that we are all supposed to be “babes.” 

LH Yes, men can wear “dress-down” clothes, they aren’t primarily judged by what they wear.  But women are always looked at for what they wear, their wardrobe, their hairstyles, their makeup or lack of makeup. Sometimes we are slow-starters,  as a result – when we are not ready to look at our values and make that social critique.

RA  Well, yes, women may be slower starters.  But I’m going to say something positive about that.   That women gain confidence slowly.  And ,as they do, women can have a great second act.