Vi Khi Nao's Review of Armantrout’s Itself

First published in Rhizomatic Ideas | August 9, 2015

Pleasure exists in reading and re-reading Armantrout’s poems for more pleasure and comprehension, but there is more infinite pleasure in misunderstanding them. Repeating the displeasure of not understanding will eventually lead to great displeasure before that displeasure gets converted into even more pleasure.

Time is geometrically built in the construct of Armantrout’s poems. Foam also expands geometrically. Foam is used to put out fires as it allows water to spread quickly. Your mind should be foam on water when you read Armantrout’s work. You don’t expect to squirt a few drops of water to stop a raging fire. You ask the ocean to help you.

Many complain that Armantrout’s poetry is too flummoxed and difficult to understand or inaccessible. They especially complain because of her acquisition of the Pulitzer Prize and The National Book Critics Circle Award. They will stop complaining when she wins the National Book Award and the Buffalo Who Can Walk Around A Faceless Circle Award. They will just have to. They want her to sound like Billy Collins, something or someone they can touch and laugh out loud un-marginally with, but she is not Billy. The lip of a vagina isn’t marginalia. Don’t write Billy Collins on it. At times she is inaccessible, but this is true for only a few poems in this collection.

For the most part, she is aware that she has and can engage you. She also talks about the cosmos, photons, butterfly, self-love, and self-love that has no self, etc. Here she writes, “If self-love/ were a mirage,//it would decorate/ distance,// shimmer over/ others’ eyes,// evaporate/ on contact” (p.13). She even writes about moments as beauty pageants she wouldn’t select if she were a judge. That is how far from nostalgia she has gone. She is way ahead of her time. She knows she has wit, age, impishness.

Her fragments did not intend to twist the arms of Sappho. Some of them are minor jokes she executes for her own pleasure before they get bounced back to us, sometimes they hit a mirror of pantomime (her own silent, disobedient giggles) and they never make it to us. We should forgive Rae Armantrout during these executions; they are absolutely not her fault.

She is brilliant. Don’t sound shocked or dismayed or paranoid.