Notice, Rae Armantrout
Wesleyan University Press, 2024
Coordinated by a sensibility attuned to but not beholden to bewilderment, Rae Armantrout’s poetry has always been a facing up to reality. More than any other poet I can think of, she treats intelligence as necessary but insufficient to the task—in essence the task of living. What she makes of insufficiency shapes the foreground of her work. The results, however, aren’t bleak. Detachment and good humor predominate, highlighting the comic qualities of bewilderment. Its whys and wherefores are pushed to the background, as they are in life.
Armantrout’s materials and scenarios are diverse, yielding in their totality a picture of the world—a world we inherit and collectively maintain. Notice sharpens the picture by focusing on climate change, bringing together fifteen poems from previous collections. Apparently, climate change has been a concern of hers all along, but blended with other concerns; it was easy not to notice. Rereading the work in this concentrated form flips our perspective. We find ourselves more attentive than usual to the background: not just Armantrout’s guiding intelligence—we’re always at least dimly aware of that—but also the ethical dimensions of her focus on bewilderment. Detachment and good humor are backlit here by insistence and dread. Her poems always provoke questions, but those are usually local matters of interpretation. Here, the questions are global. How live in this world? How safeguard its future? How care for life’s foreground and background at the same time? How attend honestly to failure without losing touch with the need to go on? Good things to be asking in 2024.
Benjamin Friedlander is a poet, scholar, and editor. His newest book of poetry is Some Cares, forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil. With Alison Fraser, Jeffrey Jullich, and Ron Silliman he recently edited Nice: The Collected Poems of David Melnick (Nightboat, 2024). Since 1999 he has taught American literature and poetics at the University of Maine, where he edits the scholarly journal Paideuma.