ARMANTROUT, Rae
Collected Prose

For three decades Rae Armantrout has been writing poetry of matchless concentration and the most precise openness. Her Collected Prose reveals that she has also been a wry and compassionate witness of the life of poetry as it occurs in her own work and in the work of others. Her prose is always plain-spoken, witty, and incisive. She reads poems with great suppleness and suggestiveness; she shows how her fundamentalist upbringing revealed the conflict between “”the singularity of event and the promiscuity of metaphor””; and in her memoir, True, the sometimes grim, sometimes comic trajectory that led from a San Diego sub-development to poetry is presented with compelling equanimity. (Check out the pearl-handled 22 she had in her teens.)rn Collected Prose articulates Armantrout”s passionate but self-critical commitment to poetry, from her early Language polemics to her current sense of a context where “”it”s not really been possible to say, ”I”ll wake ”em up with my startling ambiguities” anymore. I suppose, ultimately, I write to keep myself awake and alive.””rn It”s a pleasure to read such sentences. It is a happy circumstance that Armantrout”s Collected Prose is being published. Her prose is as good as her poetry.””rnrn —Bob Perelman

Published by Singing Horse Press, 2007
Literature