Differentials: Poetry, Poetics, Pedagogy

picks up on one item that arrests the reader’s attention and often ignores the
rest. But a close reading—and there is no other way to understand poetry,
which is, as Ezra Pound so succinctly put it, “news that stays news”—has to
account for all the elements in a given text, not just the ones that support a
particular interpretation.
From this perspective, we read Armantrout’s poem as we would any other,
whether “experimental” or conventional, contemporary or Renaissance. But
such a preliminary reading is not worth much unless we now start to ask
larger questions. What matters, after all, is not what this little poem “says”
about old age or mother-daughter relationships but how it says it and why.
The next step, then, is to place the poem in a number of larger frames: ¤rst
the book in which it appears and Armantrout’s oeuvre as a whole, then its
genre and stylistic conventions, and then its cultural and historical markers
vis-à-vis other comparable poems of the period.
First, then, context. The opening poem of Armantrout’s book is called
“Birthmark: The Pretext” and begins as follows:

You want something, that’s the pretext. I recently abandoned a

dream narrative called “Mark.” You can see it, since you asked.

MARK

I’m with three friends.

We’ve parked in a lot downtown,

lucky to get a slot.

My son’s friend

asks him if he’s divided

his homework in three parts;

luckily he has.

Suddenly, I’m the teacher.

I see a line of Milton’s

I’m glad I haven’t marked it wrong;

at ¤rst I thought it didn’t ¤t.^3

Here is the same mix of the colloquial and the oblique, the literal and the
punning, that we witnessed in “Direction.” A “pretext” is both an excuse for
doing something and a pre-text or preface that anticipates what is to come.
In the poet’s case, the “pretext” has to do with a series of recent events. But

The Case of Rae Armantrout 247