“tone-shifting” and “peculiar overlaps,” as she calls them, for collage entails
the juxtaposition, on the same verbal plane, of concrete images pasted to-
gether, whereas an Armantrout poem consists of a sequence of tenuously
interconnected clauses and phrases, where the connections between abstract
statements are regularly blurred. Brian Reed has referred to this mode as an
“attenuated hypotaxis”^5 —a useful designation, reminding us that disjunction
need not be, as is often thought, paratactic—phrases and clauses strung to-
gether by a series of “and’s”—that a pseudo-hypotaxis in which B seems to
follow A, only to turn out to be a disconnect, is another interesting mode of
procedure. Indeed, it is a more radical mode than collage, which was, after
all, the dominant poetic mode of modernism.
What is the meaning of such hypotaxis? For many poets of Armantrout’s
generation, all ordering principles are suspect as are the conventional genres.
In the age of media, as I have argued in Radical Arti¤ce: Writing Poetry in the
Age of Media (1992), linear structures with beginning, middle, and end and
forms of musical repetition have been viewed as failing to “measure” and
critique the actual social and political structures within which we live in late-
twentieth-century (now twenty-¤rst-century) America. And from her posi-
tion as a woman and hence, as we see throughout the pages of The Pretext,
forced to assume the role of caretaker, whether of her son or her mother, the
institutional structures seem especially oppressive:
When her mother worsens,
She imagines the funeral
Of a living celebrity.Who would attend?
Why or why not?Is this dream logic?
(“Her References,” Pretext 18)In her willingness to do without so much of the usual accoutrements of
poetry, Armantrout gives her full attention to its one indispensable element:
language. “All our nouns / will be back momentarily” we read in a poem
called “No,” which ends with the couplet “As if it were needless / to say,” with
its play on that most common of quali¤ers, “Needless to say... ” (46–47).
What a close reading of The Pretext will reveal is that this is a poetry obses-
sive about language itself, its “luck, parts, and [especially its] ¤t.” Poetry, in
other words, can do without symbol, metaphor, metrical elegance, and so on,
The Case of Rae Armantrout 251