Rae Armantrout famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

This is a strange book: visionary and dark. It stutters out a kind of music: repeated phrases which accumulate errors and mutate as they go like chromosomes or, as Woodward puts it better, 'visible fissile ribbons.' It's as if we were present for the moments of creation and extinction. Uncanny Valley is ominous and beautiful.
-- Rae Armantrout

#Beautiful #Book #Dark
Lily Brown writes with and against things in poems that are coiled up tight as springs (or snakes). A believer in the power of the line, she writes, 'I think the plastics/and sink them' then 'Where is the sand/man hiding the dirt.' These terse, biting poems will make you look around and wonder.
-- Rae Armantrout

#Spring #Writing #Men
clarity need not be equivalent to / readability. How readable is the world?
-- Rae Armantrout

#Poetry #World #Needs
Poetry wants to make things mean more than they mean, says someone, as if we knew how much things meant, and in what unit of measure.
-- Rae Armantrout

#Mean #Want #Units
Like all my poems, 'Negotiations' has several sources. It deals with aging lovers and the often silent deals they make. Thinking about bargains made me think of The Little Mermaid and that made me remember something I had just read about the incredibly complex process by which tadpoles (actual little mermaids) are somehow able to reabsorb their tails and fashion their future frog legs.
-- Rae Armantrout

#Fashion #Thinking #Mermaid
The fear that all this will end. The fear that it won't.
-- Rae Armantrout

#Ends
Thus drivers inching southward will see the phalanx of birds heading west as one spontaneous gesture.
-- Rae Armantrout

#Bird #West #Gestures
Like most of my poems, 'Lie' has several sources: I read a very troubling book called The Sixth Extinction. I took note of the way people, including me, enjoy talking knowledgeably about how the world will end. I drove to Tucson and saw the desert flowering on either side of the road. And I glanced at my spam to see what people wanted to sell me these days.
-- Rae Armantrout

#Lying #Book #Talking
Curled up in bed, Iâ€™m young in the old way.
-- Rae Armantrout

#Bed #Way #Young
The crowd is made of little gods, and there is still no heaven.
-- Rae Armantrout

#Heaven #Littles #Crowds
The ghosts swarm. They speak as one person. Each has left something undone.
-- Rae Armantrout

#Ghost #Speak #Undone
We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.
-- Rae Armantrout

#Mean #Half #Discourse
We sleep together in the dark but confuse light with love.
-- Rae Armantrout

#Sleep #Dark #Light
The future is all around here.' It's a place, anyplace where we don't exist.
-- Rae Armantrout
Carried by light, images remain while sensation is so evanescent as to be always beyond belief.
-- Rae Armantrout

#Light #Belief
But here I hold your dream in my poem.
-- Rae Armantrout

#Dream

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