Armantrout's Poetry "Reflects the World"

With the waning day peaking through the windows that look out onto Prescott Street, Rae Armantrout, one of the world’s most famous living postmodern poets, seated herself at a mahogany table and began to read to a couple dozen audience members amidst the stately decor of the Plimpton Room of the Humanities Center.

Armantrout, whose newest collection of poems, “Verse,” will be published in February, decided to make a stop at Harvard yesterday after touring much of New England, for readings as well as personal travel. The event was described by Sean M. McCreery, a staff assistant in the English department, as “smaller than usual.” Along with the spontaneity of the reading, it fell on the same day that two other major poets gave readings in the area, including John Ashbery at MIT.

Armantrout read from “Verse” and from her most recent compilation, “Next Life,” as well as from unpublished works. Reading with rapidity and inflection, she created images of life characterized by elements of the everyday, mixing symbols of the absolute and of the universal.

“This child fights cancer with the help of her celebrity fan club,” Armantrout read from her poem “Operations.” In another poem, from “Next Life,” she read, “Is it the beginning or end / of real love / when we pity a person / because, in him, / we see ourselves?”

Armantrout said that her work draws from many facets of daily life—the poems she read referenced Anna Nicole Smith, Playboy, CNN and the Iraq War—but that it is not a comment on any particular theme of contemporary times. “I don’t think my writing is that intentional,” she said. “It reflects the world.”

Armantrout was one of the first founders of the postmodern school of poetry known in the United States as the Language poets. Much of her original works of the 1970s period, including “Extremities” (1978) and “The Invention of Hunger” (1979), strove to allow the reader to create a personalized experience through verse. Even though her poetry addresses different topics now, many of the more recent poems shared at the reading had this same element.

“I now have a son in his 20s, but when he was younger I ended up watching cartoons with him, so my poems were filled with cartoon imagery,” Armantrout said after the reading. “I certainly don’t spend my time watching cartoons now, but an author’s poetry deals with his or her environment.”

Armantrout’s works have been published frequently in recent issues of The New Yorker and other literary magazines.

“Rae’s poetry is finally getting the worldwide attention that it has deserved for decades,” said Stephen L. Burt, an associate professor of English who has also published books of poetry. “No one could mistake any of Rae’s poems for anyone else’s.”