Rae Armantrout (born April 13, 1947) is an

American poet The poets listed below were either born in the United States or else published much of their poetry while living in that country. A B C D E F G H I–J K L M N O P Q *George Quasha (born 1942 in poetry, 1942) R ...

generally associated with the

Language poets The Language poets (or ''L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E'' poets, after the magazine of that name) are an avant-garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The poets included: Bernadette Mayer, Leslie Scalapi ...

. 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 university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

, where she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics. On March 11, 2010, Armantrout was awarded the 2009

National Book Critics Circle Award The National Book Critics Circle Awards are a set of annual American literary awards by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English".Versed ''Versed'' is a book of poetry written by Rae Armantrout and published by Wesleyan University Press in 2009 (see 2009 in poetry). It won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry after be ...

'' published by the

Wesleyan University Press Wesleyan University Press is a university press that is part of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. The press is currently directed by Suzanna Tamminen, a published poet and essayist. History and overview Founded (in its present for ...

, which had also been nominated for the National Book Award. The book later earned the 2010

Pulitzer Prize for Poetry The Pulitzer Prize for Poetry is one of the seven American Pulitzer Prizes awarded annually for Letters, Drama, and Music. It was first presented in 1922, and is given for a distinguished volume of original verse by an American author, published ...

. 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 Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...

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 to the southeast and Grantville to the southwest. History Alli ...

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 Priscilla Denise Levertov (24 October 1923 – 20 December 1997) was a British-born naturalised American poet. She was a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. Early life and influences Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Ess ...

and befriended

Ron Silliman Ron Silliman (born August 5, 1946) is an American poet. He has written and edited over 30 books, and has had his poetry and criticism translated into 12 languages. He is often associated with language poetry. Between 1979 and 2004, Silliman wr ...

, 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 at the ''Boston Review'' commented: "

William Carlos Williams William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) was an American poet, writer, and physician closely associated with modernism and imagism. In addition to his writing, Williams had a long career as a physician practicing both pedia ...

and

Emily Dickinson Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (December 10, 1830 – May 15, 1886) was an American poet. Little-known during her life, she has since been regarded as one of the most important figures in American poetry. Dickinson was born in Amherst, Massach ...

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 In poetry, a stanza (; from Italian language, Italian ''stanza'' , "room") is a group of lines within a poem, usually set off from others by a blank line or Indentation (typesetting), indentation. Stanzas can have regular rhyme scheme, rhyme and ...

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 associ ...

and more traditional stanza-based poems. In a conversation with poet, novelist, and critic

Ben Lerner Benjamin S. Lerner (born February 4, 1979) is an American poet, novelist, essayist, and critic. He has been a Fulbright Scholar, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a finalist for the National Book Award, a finalist for the National Bo ...

for ''

BOMB Magazine ''Bomb'' (stylized in all caps as ''BOMB'') is an American arts magazine edited by artists and writers, published quarterly in print and daily online. It is composed primarily of interviews between creative people working in a variety of disciplin ...

'', 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 ''From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry, 1960–1990'' is a poetry anthology published in 1994. It was edited by American poet and publisher Douglas Messerli – under his own imprint Sun & Moon Press – and includes poets fr ...

(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 File:1991 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: Boris Yeltsin, elected as Russia's first president, waves the new flag of Russia after the 1991 Soviet coup d'état attempt, orchestrated by Soviet hardliners; Mount Pinatubo erupts in the Phil ...

: ''Necromance'' (Sun and Moon Press) *

: ''Couverture'' (Les Cahiers de Royaumont) - a selection in French translation *

1995 File:1995 Events Collage V2.png, From left, clockwise: O.J. Simpson is O. J. Simpson murder case, acquitted of the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman from the 1994, year prior in "The Trial of the Century" in the United States; The ...

: ''Made To Seem'' (Sun and Moon Press) *

2001 The September 11 attacks against the United States by Al-Qaeda, which Casualties of the September 11 attacks, killed 2,977 people and instigated the global war on terror, were a defining event of 2001. The United States led a Participants in ...

: ''Veil: New and Selected Poems'' (

) *

: ''The Pretext'' (Green Integer) *

2004 2004 was designated as an International Year of Rice by the United Nations, and the International Year to Commemorate the Struggle Against Slavery and its Abolition (by UNESCO). Events January * January 3 – Flash Airlines Flight 6 ...

: ''Up to Speed'' (Wesleyan University Press) *

2007 File:2007 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: Steve Jobs unveils Apple's first iPhone; TAM Airlines Flight 3054 overruns a runway and crashes into a gas station, killing almost 200 people; Former Pakistani Prime Minister of Pakistan, Pr ...

: ''Next Life'' (Wesleyan University Press) *

2009 File:2009 Events Collage V2.png, From top left, clockwise: The vertical stabilizer of Air France Flight 447 is pulled out from the Atlantic Ocean; Barack Obama becomes the first African American to become President of the United States; 2009 Iran ...

: ''

Versed ''Versed'' is a book of poetry written by Rae Armantrout and published by Wesleyan University Press in 2009 (see 2009 in poetry). It won the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry after be ...

'' (

) - 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry *

2011 File:2011 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: a protester partaking in Occupy Wall Street heralds the beginning of the Occupy movement; protests against Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, who was killed that October; a young man celebrate ...

: ''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 fact ...

: ''Just Saying'' (Wesleyan University Press) *

2015 File:2015 Events Collage new.png, From top left, clockwise: Civil service in remembrance of November 2015 Paris attacks; Germanwings Flight 9525 was purposely crashed into the French Alps; the rubble of residences in Kathmandu following the Apri ...

: ''Itself'' (Wesleyan University Press) *

2016 File:2016 Events Collage.png, From top left, clockwise: Bombed-out buildings in Ankara following the 2016 Turkish coup d'état attempt; the impeachment trial of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff; Damaged houses during the 2016 Nagorno-Karabakh ...

: ''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 1998 was designated as the ''International Year of the Ocean''. Events January * January 6 – The '' Lunar Prospector'' spacecraft is launched into orbit around the Moon, and later finds evidence for frozen water, in soil in permanently ...

: ''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 Barrett Watten (born October 3, 1948) is an American poet, editor, and educator often associated with the Language poets. He is a professor of English at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan where he has taught modernism and cultural studie ...

, Steve Benson,

Carla Harryman Carla Harryman (born January 11, 1952) is an American poet, essayist, and playwright often associated with the Language poets. She teaches Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University and serves on the MFA faculty of the Milton Avery School of t ...

, Tom Mandel,

Kit Robinson Kit Robinson (born May 17, 1949) is an American poet, translator, writer and musician. An early member of the San Francisco Language poets circle, he has published 28 books of poetry. Life and work Born in Evanston, Illinois, Robinson graduated ...

Lyn Hejinian Lyn Hejinian (born May 17, 1941) is an American poet, essayist, translator and publisher. She is often associated with the Language poets and is known for her landmark work ''My Life'' (Sun & Moon, 1987, original version Burning Deck, 1980), a ...

, 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 The Academy of American Poets is a national, member-supported organization that promotes poets and the art of poetry. The nonprofit organization was incorporated in the state of New York in 1934. It fosters the readership of poetry through outreac ...

Profile
at ''Green Integer''

essay by Armantrout at ''

Jacket A jacket is a garment for the upper body, usually extending below the hips. A jacket typically has sleeves, and fastens in the front or slightly on the side. A jacket is generally lighter, tighter-fitting, and less insulating than a coat, which ...

'')
Interview with Armantrout
(Audio), ''

PBS NewsHour ''PBS NewsHour'' is an American evening television news program broadcast on over 350 PBS The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) is an American public broadcaster and non-commercial, free-to-air television network based in Arlington, Virg ...

'', 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