I recently gave an invited lecture to the Engineering Honors Club at the Uni-
versity of Southern California on the topic “What Is Poetry?” I learned that
most of these juniors and seniors—high I.Q. students, all of them—had
never read any poetry and couldn’t cite the name of a single poet. The only
work they had all read—and I doubt it will help them with the analysis of
radical poetries today—is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper.
So much for the “familiar canon,” the irony being that the lack of consen-
sus is not necessarily a blessing for the avant-garde. For the absence of any
serious discourse about poetry, of a real debate as to the merits of X or Y,
coupled with a commercial poetry scene controlled by only a few publishing
houses whose chosen poets win the big prizes and ¤nd their way into The
New Yorker, makes it dif¤cult to teach students how poetry actually works
and when a given poem has value. Accordingly, those of us who want to
broaden the readership for the new poetries must take nothing for granted,
must take up the work of the contemporaries we care about and read their
work closely and critically, bearing in mind that Of¤cial Verse Culture, as
Charles Bernstein has dubbed it, tends to valorize very different models.
Let me illustrate how this might work, using as an example a subtle and
intriguing book published by Green Integer Press: Rae Armantrout’s The
Pretext.^1 Armantrout is a leading and, we might say, established Language
poet—the author of seven previous collections, including one in French, and
a prose memoir—but she is hardly canonical on the New York publishing
scene represented by Norton or Vik ing, Knopf or Farrar, Straus & Giroux, by
the New York Review of Books or New York Times Book Review.^2 I shall specu-
late later in this essay why this might be the case, comparing Rae Arman-
trout’s poems to some recent work by a woman poet of the very same gen-
eration whose poetry has won every prize and honor, including a MacArthur
Fellowship, and who is currently the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric at Har-
vard. I am thinking, of course, of Jorie Graham.
For the moment, however, let’s consider how one might teach The Pretext.
Like Armantrout’s earlier books, this one is slender and compact; its ninety-
one pages include forty short poems, typically made up of two- and three-
line free-verse stanzas. There are also some prose poems, like “Performers,”
and some mixed verse-prose ones, like the title poem. Although the lyrics are
self-contained poems, this book does have a narrative thread of sorts: it con-
cerns the poet’s regular visits to a nursing home where her mother is evi-
dently dying. Only a number of the poems are directly “about” the mother,
but death is, however obliquely and sardonically, a presence throughout. Here
is a representative poem:
244 Chapter 13