Evolution—a future where perhaps we accept ourselves as we are—is never
quite complete.
These speculations on the aporias of sexual love and responsibility evi-
dently have urgency for the poet. But it is interesting to compare such gen-
eralizing statements as the concluding line’s “Where what wants to be human
still won’t show its face,” to the laconic reference to “Age as a centripetal
force” in Armantrout’s “Direction.” In the latter case, as I remarked earlier,
what is said about old age remains equivocal: is the increasing solipsism a
good thing or not? In Graham’s “Evolution,” on the other hand, the assertion
is presented as a hard-earned truth that the narrator has made her own. True,
the conclusion is presented obliquely. “What wants to be human” is evidently
the woman’s inner “animal” nature, the “wild joy sucked down” that “still
won’t show its face.” But if the line is designed to mystify the reader, the poet
herself seems to know exactly how she feels about Darwinism, sexuality, and
the need for restraint. It is not, in other words, that the speaker herself has
doubts as to the “wisdom” put forward in her ruminations on the erotic life.
Indeed—and here is an unanticipated irony—despite the talk of “wild joy”
and the “sinking” that is also a “lifting,” there is no abandon in the formal
structure of the poem. On the contrary, its elements are every where con-
trolled, its tone carefully modulated. Tone, more speci¤cally voice and ad-
dress, is one of the hardest things to talk about when analyzing poetry. But
consider the following: Why is Graham’s poem, with its evident desire for
letting go, a series of complete sentences and clauses? To whom is she speak-
ing when she asks questions like “Where is the past?” or “What is keep?” She
is clearly not asking herself, because having raised these issues she goes on to
spell out what the whole situation means. Nor is she addressing her lover, the
person referred to in lines like “I insist that we ‘go in.’ We go in” or in the
allusion to “Our future.”
Who, then, is the addressee? By all accounts it is the reader, the reader who
is to be made wiser by the poet’s oblique and ominous account of what sexual
passion does to human beings. But the profundity of the “message” is under-
mined by the reader’s recognition that in fact the poem exhibits no appre-
ciable con®ict. No worry about “luck, parts, and ¤t” here. The lovers, as this
poem makes clear, aren’t about to give each other up; they aren’t con®icted
about what they should do, or at least the speaker is not, since, in all fairness,
her lover is not given much a chance. Indeed, it is the narrator who calls the
shots. “I insist we ‘go in.’ We go in.”
But, then, what is the actual situation that haunts this poem? We never
know. In The Pretext Armantrout presents us with her dif¤cult, by no means
The Case of Rae Armantrout 255