By Bonnie Jean Michalski

Originally published in the University of Arizona Poetry Center Newsletter Vol. 33.1, Fall 2007.

Bonnie Jean Michalski: You have a way of tackling large philosophical issues while undercutting the philosophical tone that burdens so much meditative poetry: 

and I try
'instantly' then 'forever.'
But the word is
way back 
show-boating” 

(from “Up to Speed,” Up to Speed)

Can you speak to this in terms of your thinking and writing process? 

Rae Armantrout: Most of my poems involve different tones, different voices rubbing together and creating friction. I guess I don’t care for what Charles Bernstein called “tone-lock.” One internal voice may be telling another one something on the order of “Get over yourself!” In those lines from “Up to Speed” I meant that as soon as I became conscious of trying to apply either the word “instantly” or “forever” to light, both the light ray and the moment of perceiving it had passed. Description has always fallen behind. Maybe this is because it’s always involved in showing off or “showboating” and showboats are slow. 

I want to “capture” something, some experience, but I also feel that the idea that words can capture things is silly. I want to invoke my complicity in human vanity and silliness as well as to show my real appreciation for “light, the traveler.” There’s always some tension between these two impulses.

Bonnie Jean: Your poems seem to linger on objects and ideas that are hard to categorize:

1

As if a single scream
gave birth

to whole families
of traits

such as “flavor,” “color,”
“spin”

and this tendency to cling.

2

Dry, white frazzle
in a blue vase—

beautiful—

a frozen swarm
of incommensurate wishes.

(from “Close,” Next Life)

Does the stubbornly uncategorizable hold beauty for you? Frustration? Both?  

Rae: I think I have a tendency to keep identity ambiguous in order to open up possibilities for meaning. In “Close” I identify things by acknowledging their traits. Don’t we all do that? Isn’t that how we do perceive things?  “Flavor,” “color,” and “spin” are characteristics objects might have in our experiential world. They are also, as it happens, aspects of elementary particles. I think it’s possible to read the first section of “Close” psychologically, i.e., the scream that accompanies some trauma might put a certain spin on subsequent events.  On the other hand, if you know these nouns are terms in quantum mechanics, if you’re seeing things in terms of their origin in the world of physics, then that scream might be the Big Bang. Keeping the subject matter “uncategorizable” allows me to keep these two readings open so that a metaphor can develop. I don’t find it frustrating. It allows me to do more in less space.

Bonnie: What role does humor play for you in poetry, as a writer and as a reader?

Rae: I take humor seriously. Meaning itself can be funny, if you find it where or when you didn’t expect it. This is what happens in puns. Surplus meaning is funny. In my work I’m interested not so much in literal puns as in a more spread-out effect somewhere between pun and metaphor. I always take it as a compliment when people laugh at my readings.

Happy accidents and near misses can be funny. Congruity can be as funny as incongruity, if it’s unexpected. Being found where you aren’t supposed to be might be funny. A poem can catch a reader in an improper complicity. A poem can draw you along until you’ve agreed to something unseemly and even outrageous. Frank O’Hara does this, of course, but so does John Ashbery, in his way. Lyn Hejinian’s work is increasingly full of outrageous coincidences and graceful pratfalls. 

Bonnie Jean: Many of your poems explore or lament how observation is hardest when the observer pays close attention: 

Galaxies run from us.  'Don't look!'
Was this the meaning
of the warning in the Garden?
When a dreamer sees she's dreaming, it causes
figments to disperse.

How can poetry get around these issues?

Rae: Really, I want to get into these issues not around them. I’m asking how the observer affects the observed. The story of the Garden of Eden seems to tell us that there’s something flawed about consciousness. Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge and get expelled. When I read about how the universe is expanding in such a way that galaxies appear to be flying away from us on all sides, I imagine them fleeing from the contagion of consciousness or fading away from consciousness the way dream images do when we wake up. I guess you can call that a lament. At other times, though, I feel rather exhilarated by the fact that looking at anything in extreme close-up turns it into an unrecognizable wilderness.