Rae Armantrout (born April 13, 1947) is an American poet generally associated with the Language poets. She has published ten books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies. Armantrout currently teaches at the

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego is ...

, where she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics. On March 11, 2010, Armantrout was awarded the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for her book of poetry '' Versed'' published by the Wesleyan University Press, which had also been nominated for the National Book Award. The book later earned the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She is the recipient of numerous other awards for her poetry, including an award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008.

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.''Green Integer'' profile
/ref> In 1965, whilst living in the

Allied Gardens Allied Gardens is a residential neighborhood in the eastern Navajo community of San Diego, California. It neighbors San Carlos to the east, Del Cerro to the south, the College Area The College Area is a residential community in the Mid-City regi ...

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. At Berkeley, she studied with poet Denise Levertov and befriended Ron Silliman, who would become involved with the Language poets of late 1980s San Francisco. Armantrout graduated from Berkeley in 1970 and married Chuck Korkegian in 1971, whom she had dated since her first year of university.

Literary career

Armantrout published poetry in ''Caterpillar'' and from this point began to view herself as a poet. She took a master's degree in creative writing from San Francisco State University, and wrote ''Extremities'' (1978), her first book of poetry. 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. However, unlike most of the group, her work is firmly grounded in experience of the local and domestic worlds and she is widely regarded as the most lyrical of the Language Poets. Critic

Stephanie Burt Stephanie Burt (born 1971) is a literary critic and poet who is Professor of English at Harvard University. '' The New York Times'' has called her "one of the most influential poetry critics of ergeneration". Burt grew up around Washington, D.C. ...

at the ''Boston Review'' commented: " William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson together taught Armantrout how to dismantle and reassemble the forms of stanzaic lyric— how to turn it inside out and backwards, how to embody large questions and apprehensions in the conjunctions of individual words, how to generate productive clashes from arrangements of small groups of phrases. From these techniques, Armantrout has become one of the most recognizable, and one of the best, poets of her generation". As Burt noted, and as Armantrout herself acknowledges, her writing was significantly influenced by reading William Carlos Williams, whom she credits with 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 Prose poetry is poetry written in prose form instead of verse form, while preserving poetic qualities such as heightened imagery, parataxis, and emotional effects. Characteristics Prose poetry is written as prose, without the line breaks assoc ...

and more traditional stanza-based poems. In a conversation with poet, novelist, and critic Ben Lerner for '' BOMB Magazine'', Armantrout said that she is more likely to write a prose poem "when hehear the voice of a conventional narrator in erhead." Armantrout's poems have appeared in many anthologies, including ''In The American Tree'' ( National Poetry Foundation), ''Language Poetries'' ( New Directions), '' Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology'', From the Other Side of the Century (Sun & Moon), ''Out of Everywhere'' (Reality Street), ''American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Language Meets the Lyric Tradition'', (Wesleyan, 2002), ''The Oxford Book of American Poetry'' (Oxford, UP, 2006) and ''The Best American Poetry'' of ''1988'', ''2001'', ''2002'', ''2004'' and ''2007''. Armantrout has twice received a Fund For Poetry Grant and was a California Arts Council Fellowship recipient in 1989. In 2007 she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. She is currently one of ten poets working on a project entitled ''The Grand Piano: An Experiment In Collective Autobiography.'' Writing on the volume began in 1998 and the first volume (of a proposed ten) was published in November 2006, and thereafter in three-month intervals. ''Wobble'', published in November 2018, was a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award for Poetry.

Bibliography

Poetry

;Collections * * * * 1991: ''Necromance'' (Sun and Moon Press) * 1991: ''Couverture'' (Les Cahiers de Royaumont) - a selection in French translation * 1995: ''Made To Seem'' (Sun and Moon Press) * 2001: ''Veil: New and Selected Poems'' ( Wesleyan University Press) * 2001: ''The Pretext'' (Green Integer) * 2004: ''Up to Speed'' (Wesleyan University Press) * 2007: ''Next Life'' (Wesleyan University Press) * 2009: '' Versed'' ( Wesleyan University Press) - 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry * 2011: ''Money Shot'' (Wesleyan University Press) *

2013 File:2013 Events Collage V2.png, From left, clockwise: Edward Snowden becomes internationally famous for leaking classified NSA wiretapping information; Typhoon Haiyan kills over 6,000 in the Philippines and Southeast Asia; The Dhaka garment fa ...

: ''Just Saying'' (Wesleyan University Press) * 2015: ''Itself'' (Wesleyan University Press) * 2016: ''Partly: New and Selected Poems, 2001-2015'' (Wesleyan University Press) *

2018 File:2018 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: The 2018 Winter Olympics opening ceremony in PyeongChang, South Korea; Protests erupt following the Assassination of Jamal Khashoggi; March for Our Lives protests take place across the United ...

: ''Wobble'' (Wesleyan University Press) ;Chapbooks * 1998: ''writing the plot about sets'' (Chax) * ''2016'': ''Currency'' ( Yale Union) * ''2017'': ''Entanglements'' (Wesleyan University Press)Tim Murphy. The poetic physics of life. Sphinx Reviews, 2020
/ref> ;List of poems

Prose

*''True'' (Atelos, 1998) - memoir; republished in ''Collected Prose'' *''The Grand Piano: An Experiment In Collective Autobiography'' (with

Bob Perelman Bob Perelman (born December 2, 1947) is an American poet, critic, editor, and teacher. He was an early exponent of the Language poets, an avant-garde movement, originating in the 1970s. He has helped shape a "formally adventurous, politically e ...

, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, and

Ted Pearson Ted Pearson (born 1948 in Palo Alto, California) is an American poet. He is often associated with the Language poets. Life and work Pearson was born in 1948 in Palo Alto, California. He began studying liturgical music in 1960, instrumental music ...

) (Mode A/This Press, 2007) *''Collected Prose'' (Singing Horse Press, 2007);

Translations

*''Narrativ'' nglish-German, Bilingual edition, translated by Uda Strätling and Martin Göritz(Luxbooks, Wiesbaden, 2009; )

References

External links

Biography from the International Literature Festival Berlin
at Stanford
Rae Armantrout profile
at the Academy of American Poets
Profile
at ''Green Integer''

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 PENNSoundArmantrout interviewed on ''Bookworm'' at KCRW
February 26, 2009
Armantrout at the University of Chicago
gives a talk on the lyric poem (March 2011).

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
{{DEFAULTSORT:Armantrout, Rae Living people 1947 births 20th-century American poets 20th-century American women writers 21st-century American poets 21st-century American women writers American women poets Language poets Poets from California Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winners The New Yorker people University of California, San Diego faculty San Francisco State University alumni Writers from Vallejo, California