as a self-acknowledged outsider, a loner. “I myself,” as she puts it in “Writing”
(Pretext 10), “was always a forwarding address.” But, again like Niedecker, this
poet is tough-minded and self-reliant: “People come ¤rst, but / categories
outlast them,” she tells herself (21). And like Niedecker, she has a crusty,
quirky sense of humor that distinguishes her poetry from the surface so-
phistications of its New York counterpart. “Sound / as a drum / or tight as
a drum?” she asks wryly in “The Past” (21), and then responds with the
single word “Quick!” followed by the poignant question “Is recognition /
sentimental?”
Neither Niedecker nor Plath, however, foregrounded pop culture as does
Armantrout in The Pretext: the difference, no doubt, is generational. Arman-
trout’s particular discourse radius is that of comic books and late-night TV,
movie stars and department store clerks, the CBS evening news and the park-
ing lot. Domesticity, in this world of “Flagpole[s] on a traf¤c island,” is itself
mediated by media images: to be a housewife, this poetry suggests, is not to
be baking a cake or making new curtains but to be watching TV and day-
dreaming about Art Garfunkel and Joanne Woodward. In this sense Arman-
trout’s is very much a poetry of our moment—a poetry of bedroom com-
munities in Southern California, where neighbors don’t really know one
another and half of one’s waking hours are spent driving around in one’s car.
Indeed, even without any biographical knowledge, the reader surmises that
Armantrout’s giant peonies and clunky telephone poles are located in com-
munities that have little history, that her “yard strung with plastic Jack-O-
Lanterns, / some ¤lled with poinsettias” is remarkable precisely for its lack
of distinction. Her landscape is a long way from Robert Lowell’s Boston
Common or Frank O’Hara’s lunch-hour Manhattan.
This brings us to larger historical and cultural issues. What does it mean,
for starters, to have a book of poems so dismissive of every thing that tradi-
tionally goes with poetry: intricate sound repetition, stanzaic layout, and
especially a coherent “I” whose re®ections one can follow throughout the
poem, a lyric self that stands behind the poem’s metaphors and symbols?
Then, too, what happens when “poetry” declares itself to be without ge-
neric markers, whether with respect to larger verse forms—sonnet, sestina,
quatrain—or conventions, such as those of the dramatic monologue, the
pastoral eleg y, ode, or ballad? If the “new poetry” does without all these,
what does it substitute?
Armantrout herself suggests that what she is writing is collage. “I do a
kind of faux-collage where I’m mixing familiar tones and voices—say the
diction of a TV anchor man with that of an Alzheimer’s patient” (Wild Sa-
lience 12). But collage is actually not quite the right term for Armantrout’s
250 Chapter 13