this is never said directly. Instead, she gives us a “dream narrative” called
“Mark” that at ¤rst seems absolutely naturalistic and ®at except that the
three stanzas don’t cohere. What do the three friends of the ¤rst have to do
with dividing homework into three parts and the issue of “marking” (with
its pun on “Mark”) a line of Milton’s (the poet or a student in the poet’s
writing class) that didn’t “¤t”? In the prose that follows, we read:
That’s not very interesting or it’s only interesting because it’s real. It’s
a real dream composed of three banal vignettes in which the same ele-
ments appear, luck, parts, and ¤t. It’s interesting to the extent that the
divisions and the ¤tting together arise spontaneously, without pretext.
In other words, to the extent that there is a stranger in my head arrang-
ing things for me. Of course, I divided the poem in three parts. I chose
the word lucky. (Ve i l 91)Luck, parts, and ¤t: Armantrout’s “three banal vignettes” indeed fuse these
three elements: the luck of ¤nding the parking space, the tripartite division,
both of the son’s homework and of her own poem, and the issue of parts—in
this case, lines—that ¤t. In real dreams, Armantrout posits, images obviously
don’t cohere. The poet must capture that “reality” even as she is the one
choosing the words and dividing her poem into particular parts.
Here, then, is a statement of poetic that is itself poetically rendered. The
rest of the piece turns to Armantrout’s own “reality”: the strawberry-colored
birthmark on her outer left thigh, her small breasts, her rebellion against
gender identi¤cation related in her reaction to the image of Marilyn Monroe.
Here again the threefold topos of the poem—luck, parts, and ¤t—becomes
the object of self-scrutiny. Was Monroe lucky to have her particular parts?
Is the poet comfortable with her own? “Funny,” she remarks, “how you can
be excited without ¤tting in any where.” This seemingly casual observation
provides the “pretext” for the rest of the book, with its peculiar tension be-
tween not “¤tting in” and “excitement,” of separation and absorption into
what is an alien but enticing culture—the culture in which the great star,
blessed with those amazing breasts, nevertheless has “a squeaky little girl
voice.” “The Birthmark” ends with the sentence “But I’ve gone off on a tan-
gent when what I wanted to do was swallow my own pretext.” The metaphor
is apt: what may look “tangential” is really a “pretext” the poet has carefully
“swallowed” or made her own as the motive that looks ahead to, and is the
raison d’être for, what follows.
What sort of poetry is this, and where is it positioned in the culture? Why,
for example, is this “poem” written primarily in prose? Readers new to such
248 Chapter 13