Rae Armantrout (born April 13, 1947) is an American poet generally associated with the Language poets. She has published more than two dozen books, including both poetry and prose.

Armantrout was awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for her book Versed which was also nominated for the National Book Award. Versed later received the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Armantrout is now retired from her long tenure teaching at the University of California, San Diego, where she was Professor of Poetry and Poetics.

Early life

Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California. An only child, she was raised among military communities on naval bases, predominantly in San Diego. In her autobiography True (1998), she describes herself as having endured an insular childhood, a sensitive child of working class, Methodist fundamentalist parents.

In 1965, while living in the Allied Gardens district with her parents, Armantrout attended San Diego State University, intending to major in anthropology. During her studies she transferred to English and American literature, later studying at the University of California, Berkeley.

Armantrout was one of a group of ten poets who participated in The Grand Piano: An Experiment In Collective Autobiography. Writing for these volumes began in 1998 and the first of its 10 volumes was published in November 2006.

Wobble, published in November 2018, was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award for Poetry.

Style

Armantrout was a member of the original West Coast Language group. Although Language poetry can be seen as advocating a poetics of nonreferentiality, Armantrout's work, focusing as it often does on the local and the domestic, resists such definitions. Unlike most of the group, her work is firmly grounded in experience of the local and domestic worlds and she is regarded by some as the most lyrical of the Language Poets.

Armantrout credits William Carlos Williams for developing her "sense of the line" and her understanding that "line breaks can create suspense and can destabilize meaning through delay." The basic unit of meaning in Armantrout's poetry is either the stanza or the section, and she writes both prose poetry and more traditional stanza-based poems.

In a published interview with poet and novelist Ben Lerner for BOMB Magazine, Armantrout said that she is more likely to write a prose poem "when [she] hear[s] the voice of a conventional narrator in [her] head."

Reception

Critic Stephanie Burt at the Boston Review commented:

Personal life

Armantrout graduated from University of California, Berkeley in 1970 and married Chuck Korkegian in 1971, whom she had dated since her first year at the university. Armantrout resides in the Seattle area.

  • Entanglements (Wesleyan University Press, 2020)
  • Notice (Wesleyan University Press, 2024)

Prose

  • True (Atelos, 1998) - memoir; republished in Collected Prose
  • The Grand Piano: An Experiment In Collective Autobiography (with Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, and Ted Pearson) (Mode A/This Press, 2007)
  • Collected Prose (Singing Horse Press, 2007);

List of poems

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!width=25%|Title

!|Year

!|First published

!|Reprinted/collected

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|Before

|2013

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|Fusion

|2016

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|Making

|2015

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References

Further reading

  • A Wild Salience: the Writing of Rae Armantrout (Burning Press, 2000; ) — featuring essays and poems on or inspired by her work including pieces by Robert Creeley, Susan Wheeler, Hank Lazer, Bob Perelman, Lydia Davis, Lyn Hejinian, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Ron Silliman, Brenda Hillman, Fanny Howe and others
  • A Suite of Poetic Voices: "Interview" (with Manuel Brito), (Santa Brigada, Spain: Kadle Books, 1994)
  • Biography from the International Literature Festival Berlin
  • Rae Armantrout Papers at Stanford
  • The UCSD Register of Rae Armantrout Papers, 1954-2009
  • Rae Armantrout profile at the Academy of American Poets
  • Profile at Green Integer
  • "Cosmology and Me", essay by Armantrout at Jacket)
  • Interview with Armantrout (Audio), PBS NewsHour, April 19, 2010. Includes poems and transcript.
  • Interview in BOMB Magazine . Winter 2011
  • Armantrout resources at PENNSound
  • Armantrout interviewed on Bookworm at KCRW, February 26, 2009
  • Armantrout at the University of Chicago gives a talk on the lyric poem (March 2011).
  • "The (Pulitzer-Winning) Poet is a Quilter. The Poet is a Collector. The Poet is 62" , at Women's voices for change April 14, 2010
  • Interview in Spanish magazine Jot Down, March 2012
  • On Poetry and Complexity - Conversation with Madhur Anand, Roald Hoffman, and Sarah Tolmie On Poetry and Complexity