Rae Armantrout Quotes & Sayings

Lily Brown writes with and against things in poems that are coiled up tight as springs (or snakes). A believer in the power of the line, she writes, 'I think the plastics/and sink them' then 'Where is the sand/man hiding the dirt.' These terse, biting poems will make you look around and wonder. — Rae Armantrout

This is a strange book: visionary and dark. It stutters out a kind of music: repeated phrases which accumulate errors and mutate as they go like chromosomes or, as Woodward puts it better, 'visible fissile ribbons.' It's as if we were present for the moments of creation and extinction. Uncanny Valley is ominous and beautiful. — Rae Armantrout

Thus drivers inching southward will see the phalanx of birds heading west as one spontaneous gesture. — Rae Armantrout

A sense of mission lost
in ink's
jagged outcrops.
I was trying to tell myself
what I must have known
before
in a form
I wouldn't recognize at first. — Rae Armantrout

Perfect molecules of plastic sheet the seas. — Rae Armantrout

The ghosts swarm. They speak as one person. Each has left something undone. — Rae Armantrout

The future is all around here.' It's a place, anyplace where we don't exist. — Rae Armantrout

I'm composed largely of what the streets and rooms look like, of how to arrive 'just' here. — Rae Armantrout

Mozart creates a universe out of pleasantries. — Rae Armantrout

Poetry wants to make things mean more than they mean, says someone, as if we knew how much things meant, and in what unit of measure. — Rae Armantrout

So much happiness is caged in language, ready to burst out anytime and fade — Rae Armantrout

We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean. — Rae Armantrout

Carried by light, images remain while sensation is so evanescent as to be always beyond belief. — Rae Armantrout

Now light sits in the chairs — Rae Armantrout

Like all my poems, 'Negotiations' has several sources. It deals with aging lovers and the often silent deals they make. Thinking about bargains made me think of The Little Mermaid and that made me remember something I had just read about the incredibly complex process by which tadpoles (actual little mermaids) are somehow able to reabsorb their tails and fashion their future frog legs. — Rae Armantrout

I know you by your willingness. — Rae Armantrout

Metaphor is ritual sacrifice. It kills the look-alike. No, metaphor is homeopathy. — Rae Armantrout

Today could be described as a retired man humming tunelessly to himself. — Rae Armantrout

As a child,
I was abandoned
in a story
made of trees.
Here's the small
gasp
of this clearing
come "upon" "again — Rae Armantrout

Ends Meet


1
Could be
time is practice,

balance,

the action
executed in the mind
before and after.

Where does mind end?


2
We mark a break
with what has come before,

come through the door,

down the hatch.

Not a clean break
exactly.


3
Our life was rehearsal,
Mother almost said

so that we believed
we would escort her

to the future
where she could be happy. — Rae Armantrout

The crowd is made of little gods, and there is still no heaven. — Rae Armantrout

Simple
Complex systems can arise
from simple rules.
It's not
that we want to survive,
it's that we've been drugged
and made to act
as if we do
while all the while
the sea breaks
and rolls, painlessly, under.
If we're not copying it,
we're lonely.
Is this the knowledge
that demands to be
passed down?
Time is made from swatches
of heaven and hell.
If we're not killing it,
we're hungry. — Rae Armantrout

We sleep together in the dark but confuse light with love. — Rae Armantrout

In the updraft, the particulate glitz is beside itself. — Rae Armantrout

Clarity need not be equivalent to / readability. How readable is the world? — Rae Armantrout

Metaphor forms a crust beneath which the crevasse of each experience. — Rae Armantrout

This route is only one of several imaginary paths. — Rae Armantrout

The fear
that all this
will end.
The fear
that it won't. — Rae Armantrout

Like most of my poems, 'Lie' has several sources: I read a very troubling book called The Sixth Extinction. I took note of the way people, including me, enjoy talking knowledgeably about how the world will end. I drove to Tucson and saw the desert flowering on either side of the road. And I glanced at my spam to see what people wanted to sell me these days. — Rae Armantrout

Curled up in bed,
I'm young
in the old way. — Rae Armantrout

But here I hold your dream in my poem. — Rae Armantrout

The feeling of emptiness is a pre-existing condition. Jargon forces intimacy. — Rae Armantrout

When I dreamed about flying,
it was as a skill
I needed to regain. — Rae Armantrout