work sometimes object that poems like “The Birthmark” and “Direction” are
not suf¤ciently concrete or graphic, that this poet’s ruminations on “luck,
parts, and ¤t” are not properly “emotive” and hence “moving.” Isn’t poetry, at
least in the extracts from the Norton Anthology the student may have seen,
the expression of powerful feelings? Why, then, Armantrout’s largely abstract
diction? And why speak of the female gender as an oppressive “birthmark”
rather than dramatizing the speci¤c sexual feelings this particular woman
might have?
To answer such potential objections, the instructor must confront issues
of genre and convention. It is not enough to say that Armantrout’s predilec-
tion for abstract nouns and adjectives and “prosaic” rhy thms has to do with
her status as a “Language poet,” or again, that the “fragmentation” and dis-
location of her phrasing is a feminist response to patriarchy. Armantrout
herself has remarked, in an interview with Lyn Hejinian, “I don’t think we
can say that fragmentation and polyvalence are feminine styles sometimes
appropriated by men.... Aren’t these the techniques of all the great modern-
ists (Joyce, Pound, Eliot, and the later Williams as well as Stein and H. D.)?”^4
At the same time—and I shall come back to this point—gender obviously
does make a difference in The Pretext as does Armantrout’s long involvement
with the Language community. But for the moment it should be noted that
Armantrout’s poetry is really very unlike that of Ron Silliman or Bob Perel-
man or even that of Lyn Hejinian. What, then, is it like? What assumptions
govern its verbal and rhy thmical choices?
The ¤rst thing to say—though it may seem obvious—is that Arman-
trout’s is a decidedly American poetic. There are in her lyrics no appreciable
echoes of canonical English poetry, no allusions to Wordsworth or Keats
or, for that matter, to such early modernists as Yeats and Hardy. This exclu-
sion immediately differentiates Armantrout’s lyric not only from a poet like
Allen Ginsberg, for whom Blake was central, but also from John Ashbery’s,
where, despite an overlay of French Dada and Surrealism, allusions to and
borrowings from the Romantic and Victorian poets are decisive. Then, too,
Armantrout’s syntactic structures are largely those of American working-
class speech, minimally grammatical and often slangy, as in “She said, ‘If
you’re gonna hire / the dummies, I quit!’ ” (“The Past,” Pretext 21). And the
minimalism of her free-verse stanzas, with their curious line breaks and in-
corporated silences, suggest that traditional verse forms have long since lost
any attraction as have such classical genres as ode or pastoral elegy. Arman-
trout’s is poetry written in the Williams mode as that mode was developed
by Creeley, George Oppen, and especially Lorine Niedecker. Like Niedecker,
whose poems the students might be given as analogues, Armantrout writes
The Case of Rae Armantrout 249