Content area
Full text
In the past fifteen years, Rae Armantrout has emerged as one of the most artful and inventive poets identified with the terms "Language writing" and "language-centered poetry." Armantrout herself has qualms about the usefulness of such labels, and indeed her own work often seems to bear a tenuous relation to familiar language-writing practices.(1) Her poems are typically grounded in the lyric, albeit lyric of an elliptical and disjunctive sort, and she has argued for the possibilities of the lyric as an alternative to the prose-work of "the new sentence" associated with such writers as Ron Silliman ("Poetic Silence" 32). And she has kept a skeptical distance from theoretical debate concerning language and referentiality: "To believe non-referentiality is possible is to believe language can be divorced from thought, words from their histories" ("Why'" 544). Her comments on contemporaries whose work she values suggest her own Wittgensteinian respect for the possibilities of language to make and remake a world: those writers, she says, "bring the underlying structures of language/thought into consciousness. They spurn the facile. Though they generally don't believe in the Truth, they are scrupulously honest about the way word relates to word, sentence to sentence" ("Why'" 546). Armantrout's position as a Language poet seems most clearly grounded in a like attention to linguistic relations and a like skepticism toward the Truth, toward what in a recent essay she calls "a universal standard" ("Feminist Poetics" 12) toward truths that claim more than a provisional status, toward modes of writing and representation that claim a natural or obvious relation to matters of authenticity and value. What Armantrout says of Carla Harryman's writing applies to her own: it "resists stasis, attacks any form of the given" ("Review" 237) and challenges what in "Through Walls" she calls "well-known words" (Precedence 25). More specifically, Armantrout's writing challenges familiar forms of narrative sense-making, what she calls in "Fiction" "the set trajectory" and in "Pairs" the "one true path" that moves toward a single, certain, inescapable conclusion (Invention; Necromance 44). As Jerome McGann notes of Language poets generally, "Narrativity is an especially problematic feature of discourse, to these writers, because its structures lay down 'stories' which serve to limit and order the field of experience" (638). The particular sequences of authority that...