but what it cannot do without is what Aristotle called to prepon—¤tness or
relatedness. In the line “Origin’s a sore point,” for example, “sore point” is
obviously a dead metaphor, but in the poem “Direction,” in which the old
woman “sheds tears,” the “sore point” is also a literal reference. In the me-
tonymic network of the poem, cliché is regularly twisted (often into pun) so
as to yield new meanings, as in “To postpone withdrawal / by spreading one-
self thin.”
In this scheme of things, poetry is, as David Antin has put it, the lan-
guage art, and so the relative success of a given set of poems has to do with
its recharging of the language, its ability to make words and lines resonate.
Sound (repetition, internal rhyme, consonance) does play a part as does the
poem’s placement of text and white space. The question, one of Armantrout’s
favorite rhetorical devices, is regularly left hanging, and when, down the
page, a putative answer comes, it seems to be to another question. And the
sudden shifts from concrete image to abstract noun and verb, many of them
placed within pseudo-propositions, suggest that one cannot make present the
world outside oneself; there are only tentative moves in that direction. In
“Greeting,” for example, the image of the telephone pole, “shouldering a
complement / of knobs” (68), suddenly yields to thoughts of circumstance:
“the way a single word / could mean / necessary, relative, / provisional.” The
force of these meditative lines is to transform the image of the “wood pole’s
/ rosy crossbar” into an anticipation of the death pre¤gured in the bird’s
“®ick past” on the ¤nal lines. We can’t read “Greeting,” we can only reread it.
The complexities of this disjointed, minimalist poetry will make more
sense to students if it is read against its alternatives on the current poetry
scene. An interesting counterpart, as I mentioned above, is found in the po-
etry of Jorie Graham, one of the most admired poets writing in America
today. Consider a recent poem called “Evolution,” which appeared in Gra-
ham’s Never (2002) less than a year after Armantrout’s The Pretext:^6
One’s nakedness is very slow.
One calls to it, one wastes one’s sympathy.
Comparison, too, is very slow.
Where is the past?
I sense that we should keep this coming.
Something like joy rivulets along the sand.
I insist that we “go in.” We go in.
One cannot keep all of it. What is enough
of it. And keep?—I am being swept away—
what is keep?—A waking good.252 Chapter 13