Monday, October 8, 2007

Rae Armantrout: The Poetic Dance of Consciousness


Above: The poster for Rae Armantrout's reading: Thursday, 7 p.m., 6191 Helen C. White Hall. Be there.

This is going to be a busy, busy week. But be sure put Rae Armantrout's reading on your calendar. She'll be reading on Thursday night, from 7 - 8:30 in 6191 Helen C. White Hall.

From Poets.org:

Rae Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California, in 1947, and grew up in San Diego. She holds a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where she studied with Denise Levertov, and a master's degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University. She has published nine books of poetry, including: Up to Speed (Wesleyan 2004), a finalist for the PEN USA Award in Poetry; Veil: New and Selected Poems (2001), also a finalist for the PEN Center USA Award; The Pretext (2001); Made To Seem (1995); and The Invention of Hunger (1979). Her forthcoming collection, Next Life, was published by Wesleyan in February.

Part of the first generation of Language poets on the West Coast, her work has been praised for syntax that borders on everyday speech while grappling with questions of deception and distortion in both language and consciousness. About her poems, Robert Creeley has described “a quiet and enabling signature,” adding, “I don’t think there’s another poet writing who is so consummate in authority and yet so generous to her readers and company alike.”

In the preface to her selected poems, Veil, Ron Silliman describes her work as: "the literature of the anti-lyric, those poems that at first glance appear contained and perhaps even simple, but which upon the slightest examination rapidly provoke a sort of vertigo effect as element after element begins to spin wildly toward more radical...possibilities."

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