A Study Of The Poetry Of Rae Armantrout

Rae Armantrout(1947-),winner of 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and National Book Critics Circle Award,and a finalist for the National Book Award,is one of the only three poets in the history of American poetry to win two out of the three foregoing awards in a year.Hailed as "one of the most recognizable,and one of the best poets of her generation" and "the most genuinely experimental poet to get the Pulitzer since John Ashbery",she securely ranks amongst the precious few contemporary American poets most broadly popular in the triple circles of poetry,critical reception,and trade publishing.Armantrout's poems have not only been competitively published in many renowned "up-market" venues such as Poetry,The New Yorker,and The New York Times,but also in numerous anthologies,such as The Oxford Book of American Poetry(2006),The New American Poetry of Engagement(2012),and many versions of Best American Poetry.Further more,her poems have been introduced through translation into many other countries including France,Germany,Canada,Mexico,and China,drawing increasingly wide attention from around the international literary world.However,in striking contrast with her brilliant achievements and soaring influence on the international poetic arena,the scholarly criticism of Armantrout's poetry in China's literary context is still a visible rarity,which leaves immense space for relevant studies to follow up.Following the latest cultural trend and related research tendencies,and drawing on the theories of postmodernist poetry and cultural critique in conjunction with the important guidelines of poetry criticism proposed by eminent literary theorists and critics such as Marjorie Perloff and Terry Eagleton,this research aims to make a comprehensive and systematic exploration of Armantrout's poetry and ars poetica from both longitudinal and transversal perspectives by starting with a categorization of the development phases of her growth as a poet and evolving stages of her writing,which is further followed by an in-depth and methodical abstraction and explication of her poetic ideas and proposals,the artistic strategies and distinct aesthetic features that mark her poetry as a whole,as well as an overall evaluation of the significance and limitations of Armantrout's poetry,based on close reading of her poetic oeuvre ranging from Extremities(1978)to Just Saying(2013).To that end,this study seeks to achieve the following objectives:First,starting off with a biographical study of Armantrout's growth as a poet,it intends to make a categorization from a longitudinal perspective of her oeuvre now comprising a dozen of books of poetry ranging from Extremities(1978)to Just Saying(2013)in trying to demonstrate the fluctuations and evolvement of her thematic concerns and poetic artistry as a whole.Second,it proceeds with a comprehensive and systematic exploration from a transversal perspective of Armantrout's ars poetica in contrast with the major poetic tendencies advocated by the Language Poets in general by keeping a simultaneous eye on her critical inheritance of the poetries of her poetic predecessors such as Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams.Finally,it aims to explicate the idiosyncratic features of Armantrout's poetry as a whole in terms of her poetic concerns,artistic strategies,and aesthetic values by focusing on her particular poetic praxis resolved to bridge up the gap between the experimental and the experiential by combining in the space of poetry innovative interests with social observation in the hope of demonstrating its significance upon contemporary American poetry in varied dimensions and its major problems and limitations.The whole dissertation is comprised of 6 chapters.Chapter 1 is the introduction to the research,which breaks into two parts:"Research Review" and "Literature Review".The former encapsulates the content of the whole study in terms of its research objectives and procedures,research methods,and research significance,while the latter is devoted to an in-depth account and analysis of the studies made on the poetry of Rae Armantrout in both international and domestic contexts,which closes with a reiteration of the objectives of this research.Chapter 2 is entitled "The Rise of Armantrout's Poetry",which further comprises two parts including "Armantrout's Growth as a Poet" and "Stages of Armantrout's Writing." Part one reviews from the biographical perspective of Armantrout's life background and process of her growth as a poet,particularly the incidents and experience that have made major influence upon her writing.Part two,on the other hand,is an overview of Armantrout's writing career by categorizing it roughly into three stages,such as germination,ascension,and acceleration based on her oeuvre published between 1978 and 2013.Based on a descriptive account of all the collections of poetry Armantxout has published during each phase,paired with an encapsulation of their major thematic concerns and poetic artistry,it is attempted as a mapping of the evolvement and overall tendency of Armantrout's poetic writing as a whole.Chapter 3,"Aramantrout's Ars Poetica",is a systematic elucidation of Armantrout's poetic ideas and theories that the author has extracted and sorted out from scattered venues,such as her proses,large numbers of interviews,correspondence,journals and poetic pieces,etc.The elucidation is further divided into three parts.Part one deals with what the author calls the "general theories" that Armantrout has made as regards poetry,which include her ideas on language,her definition and standards of poetry,and her goal of writing.Part two and three are sequentially devoted to in-depth elaborations and interpretations of the two most important guiding principles that run across Armantrout's career as a poet,which she defines respectively as "Poetic Silence" and"Cheshire Poetics."Chapter 4,"Armantrout's Artistic Strategies",is an expatiation and analysis made in light of postmodernist poetry of four major poetic strategies that Armantrout's applies in her poetry,which include "hybridizing","border crossing","collaging" and"juxtaposing".As the research shows,Armantrout's hybridization occurs chiefly at the stylistic level and is manifested in three ways,such as the hybridization of the high and low,the hybridization of the serious and the playful,and the hybridization of the poetic and the unpoetic."Border-crossing",on the other hand,refers to her incorporation of prose poetry,which,as Armantrout's critical acceptance of the "group" aesthetic tendency of the Language Poets,is in effect a compromising gesture she makes to maintain her own poetic character.It is mainly conducted in two instances:one is the incorporation of pure prose poems,the other,the incorporation within one poem of both lineated sections and prose paragraphs.Armantrout's "collaging" strategy,on the other hand,while serving at a technical level for her to expand the lengths of her poems,also works for her at particular ideological level and is manifested in two ways,including the collage in its original sense and what she calls "faux-collage." Finally,"juxtaposing",one more important Armantrout's poetic strategy,entails three typical perspective shifts,such as the juxtaposition between the abstract and the concrete,the juxtapositionbetween the far and the near,and the juxtaposition between the observed and the observer.Chapter 5,which is entitled "Aesthetic Features of Armantrout's Poetry",closely expounds the poetic characteristics that mark Armantrout's poetry as a whole,including its lyricism,indeterminacy,and political character.As the research evinces,the lyricism of Armantrout's poetry is most evidently accomplished in three major thematic concerns,which includes "lyricism of destabilized subjectivity," "lyricism of the quotidian," and"lyricism of 'Now.'" What's more,the character of indeterminacy of Armantrout's poetry is also demonstrated in three aspects,which include its receptivity to the readers'participation,its tolerance for uncertainty arising from the limits of knowledge,and its recognition of the limits of the poet.Finally,the political character of Armantrout's poetry,on the other hand,is most embodied in two major themes,including her critique of American culture as represented in American media,and her critique of the urban space as she finds herself in.Chapter 6 is the concluding part of the dissertation.Following a quick summary of the major discussions made in previous chapters,this chapter brings the whole study to an overall evaluation of Armantrout's poetry on social,cultural,aesthetic and theoretical levels,pointing at the same time to its problems and limitations in both form and content.Before the end,this chapter also addresses the limitations of this research itself and previews some suggestions for future studies.As this study intends to expatiate,privileging poetry as a way of thinking and"staying awake" from what she calls "the interventions of capitalism into consciousness",Armantrout smashes the boundaries across different languages,genres and contexts,and challenges commonly held notions about what poetry is and how it should look on the page.In this,she destabilizes in unpredictable ways the linear progression of single first-person voice,conventional metaphor,traditional ways of sense-making,therefore characterizing her poetry with distinctive senses of lyricism,indeterminacy,and political character.Far from simple decisions made out of aesthetic or technical preferences,her poetic ideas and concerns,her literary devices and strategies,are more of a philosophical decision consciously made in response to the conflicts and confusions deeply embedded in the larger cultural systems of contemporary American society.Paradoxically,they have evolved to a larger extent in her assimilation of and resistance to the "group" aesthetics proposed by the Language Poets,to whom Armantrout has been affiliated since 1970s.At its root,Armantrout's poetry and ars poetica are both built on a deep sense of skepticism of authority,which has evolved in part from her resistance to the family stories she grew up with,and in part from the duality she locates in the urban space of her writing.In the depth of this uncertainty and suspicion,she reaches beyond the hermetic sphere of the self and continuously probes beneath the surface of things by setting her poetry deeply rooted in the felt immediacy of American realities.Drawing from vast and wildly varied reservoir of resources of the outside world,her poems are emphatically attuned to disguised ways of constructing "false consciousness" by American culture,becoming thereby what Stephen Burt calls "the(sic)poet of our contemporary frustration with what we might call the social construction of everything."In an almost self-erasing broadmindedness that disavows the sense of condescending elitism of the poet as acclaimed in traditional context of American poetry,Armantrout writes consistently about concerns beyond the personal,epiphanic,or aesthetic,and therefore perfectly bridges the gap between the personal and the social,safely securing her poetry as an important constituent of the latest cultural trend of contemporary American poetry to turn toward social engagement.Terse and taciturn,her poetry embodies an exalted ethics of writing by seeking to share with the readers a kind of theoretical democracy and verbal wealth that poetry can possibly offer.Her verbal landscape features fissures,gaps,ironies,and word games that invite the readers' participation in the construction of meaning,and therefore transform them from passive consumers into active thinkers with a "heightened alertness" to established protocols of sense-making,charging her poems with what Rob Stanton hails as the great social power of "political intervention," which in turn elevates"her work beyond that of most of her contemporaries" and making it "some of the greatest art of our time."As the poet writes in the poem no accidentally titled "Double","[t]o see them is to see double",in her pursuit of "Cheshire poetics",Armantrout makes senses out of the senseless and connections out of the disconnected,consistently revealing what is untrue in what's seemingly true,what is unsaid in what's said.Though poetically rendered,this line works not only for Armantrout as an excellent annotation of her poetic thinking,but also for the reader as a secret key to decrypt her poetic landscape at large,reminding us that fact and fiction,truth and falsity-those are what intertwines to make the world.The deep sense of uncertainty that runs across Armantrout's oeuvre not only embodies American intellectuals' anxiety about the social and cultural realities they find themselves in,but also the anxiety of contemporary American poetry at large.