intransigence, the edge, that we ¤nd in the best Language poetries. Its audi-
ence may well be wider, but its reach, probably narrower.
The challenge of Armantrout’s quirky lyric may thus be more satisfy-
ing than the stylishness we have come to associate with Jorie Graham. Seem-
ingly slight as Armantrout’s poems sometimes seem to be, especially when
one compares a book like The Pretext to a Graham volume like The Swarm
(2000) or Materialism (1997), they exhibit every where a strenuous thinking
that takes nothing for granted. I don’t claim for a moment that they surpass,
in any way, their great modernist forebears; to my mind—and this is too
complicated a subject to develop here—the real “revolution of the word”
came early in our century, even if its promise is only now being realized. And
I also don’t want to argue that Armantrout is always successful: in “Direc-
tion,” for example, the reference to Mary as Jesus’ “Mom” strikes me as ex-
cessively cute. But what reading her work against Graham’s suggests is that
even as we must take the Other of “experimental” poetry quite seriously, not-
ing that there are many overlaps between Graham’s “Evolution” and Arman-
trout’s “Birthmark,” we must also discriminate between their respective po-
etic stances and their place in literary as well as cultural history.
I am by no means making the case for a false and easy ecumenicalism that
takes its poetry wherever it happens to ¤nd it and treats it as so many discrete
items, all of them interesting and somehow of value. But I do feel that before
we decide who is writing what claims to be the truly innovative poetry and
how we should teach it, the more closely we weigh the various alternatives
before us. How to teach the new “experimental” poetry? Take nothing for
granted. In Armantrout’s words:
Just reproducing it
requires
all the concentration
you are: this
taut prong
holding forth.
(Pretext 83)The Case of Rae Armantrout 257