Rae Armantrout

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Rae Armantrout (born 13 April 1947) is an American poet generally associated with the Language Poets. Armantrout was born in Vallejo, California but grew up in San Diego. She has published nine books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies. Armantrout currently teaches at the University of California, San Diego, where she is Professor of Poetry and Poetics .

Contents

[edit] Overview

"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".
Stephen Burt[1]

Graduating from the University of California, Berkeley in 1970, Armantrout later received a master's degree in creative writing at San Francisco State University in 1975. She 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[2]. 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. [3]

Her 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, and 2004.

Armantrout has twice received a Fund For Poetry Grant and was a California Arts Council Fellowship recipient in 1989. 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.

[edit] Selected Bibliography

[edit] Poetry

  • Extremities (The Figures, 1978) - poetry
  • The Invention of Hunger (Tuumba, 1979) - poetry
  • Precedence (Burning Deck, 1985) - poetry
  • Necromance (Sun and Moon Press, 1991) - poetry
  • Couverture (Les Cahiers de Royaumont, 1991) - a selected in French translation
  • Made To Seem (Sun and Moon Press, 1995) - poetry
  • writing the plot about sets (Chax, 1998)
  • Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press, 2001) - poetry
  • The Pretext (Green Integer, 2001) - poetry
  • Up to Speed (Wesleyan, 2004) - poetry
  • Next Life (Wesleyan, 2007) - poetry
  • Complete Early Poems (Green Integer, 2008; forthcoming) - early collections, from 1978's Extremities to 1995's Made to Seem collected here

[edit] Prose

[edit] Further reading

[edit] References

  1. ^ ""Where Every Eye's a Guard: Rae Armantrout's poetry of suspicion" (2002), Boston Review, April/May 2002." . 
  2. ^ Rae Armantrout Papers at Stanford University
  3. ^ Author Page at Internationales Literatufestival Berlin Armantrout was a Guest of the ILB ( Internationales Literatufestival Berlin / Germany ) in 2005

[edit] External links

Languages