First reading of Rae Armantrout's 'Spin' (3)

Dee Morris’s short essay on Rae Armantrout’s “Spin” is the third of five first readings of that poem we will publish in this new series. Jennifer Ashton’s was the first, Katie Price’s the second. The series page can be found here. — Brian Reed, Craig Dworkin, and Al Filreis

* * *

Spin Points

The little fish swim
around and around
and away. (True 19)

Rae Armantrout, first grader, wrote this poem for Miss Sampluski, who had her students “sit in a circle on the floor and make up poems which she would mimeograph and bind in a little magazine” (True 19).  The paragraphs that follow take the fishes’ trajectory—“around and around / and away” — as a way to describe a mind, mine, slipping into and out of the force field of Armantrout’s “Spin.”

It’s not necessary to have to have a name that ends in “-trout” to take the noun-verb “fish”— the state of being a fish, the act of trying to catch a fish—as an ideogram for thought.  H.D. did it — “I cover you with my net. / What are you, banded one?” she asks in “The Pool.”  Pound did it in ABC of Reading, invoking Agassiz, who presented his post-graduate with a little fish and asked him to describe it.  “That’s only a sunfish,” the hapless student said, then, worse, “Icthus Heliodiplodius” (17).  Nouns.  What is wanted is the flash, the spin, the “around and around / and away.”

around: . . . in the round, in a circumference, in a circle
The liveliest words in the first of this poem’s three parts are the noun-verbs point and spin.  A hypothesis — “That we are composed / of dimensionless points” — is elaborated, as H.D. and Agassiz might advise, not categorically or abstractly but, borrowing Pound’s description of Agassiz’s METHOD, through “careful first-hand examination of the matter” (17).  As if looking through a microscope, jotting in a lab book, Armantrout describes dimensionless points as entities that propagate through space.  Spreading across the page in parallel clauses, these are points

which nonetheless spin,

which nonetheless exist
in space,

which is a mapping

of dimensions.

A dimensionless point is a category breaker: a Cheshire cat, Schrödlinger’s cat, part of the both-and quantum field Money Shot evokes in such phrases as “absolute velocity” (6), “time travel paradox” (7), and “quirks and quarks” (13).

Logic — to be precise, Newton’s logic, in which points by definition occupy space and can be measured — can’t go there; a poem, however, might, like quantum physics, gesture in that direction.  Invoking Heisenberg’s “uncertainty principle,” Armantrout’s poem “Human” gives the rule: “the more clearly we understand //  (waves)      (particles) // the less clearly / we see” (39).   In quantum physics, the line “(waves)      (particles)” is a spin-flip: a jump from one state to another.  To understand, think both actual and potential.  The Miss Sampluski of Money Shot sets the task in the volume’s first poem: “Define possible” (1).  Think, that is, around; think “nonetheless.”

around: all about, at random, as in to fool around
Extending his description of Agassiz’s METHOD, Pound adds a second step: “continual COMPARISON of one ‘slide’ or specimen with another” (17).  Armantrout gives the poem a second part:

The pundit says
the candidate’s speech
hit
“all the right points,”

hit “fed-up” but “not bitter,”
hit “not hearkening back.”

For the pundit, the politician’s points are “right” not because they’re clear but because they blur the matter at hand.  To  logic, add rhetoric: hot air, Icthus Heliodiplodius, something fishy. 

Money Shot swarms with spin.  Its world is the bubble Peter Sloterdijk calls “the world interior of capital”: a “self-pampering endosphere” (196), an artificial construct of “luxury and chronic overabundance,” Ponzi schemes (23), astroturf calls (23), and “custom content feeds” (29) in which money talks, deals are sealed, values swell and collapse.  Even if the candidate “hits all the right points,” everything, soggy dough to dicks, “under- / perform[s] in heavy / trading” (47).  Nothing “hearkens back.”

To hearken back — “now only,” the OED says, “poet.” — is “to pay attention.”

and away: . . . a way

Light strikes our eyes
and we say, “Look there!”

The third section’s point is an act of pointing.  Like the poem in which it is embedded, it has three sections: there’s something — call it “light” — outside the bubble of language; that something comes to our attention; using language — sparely, carefully — we pass in on.  “We say,” minimally but nonetheless “’Look there!’”

So?

Call me a spindoctor, if you will, but I want to believe it’s possible to discriminate among speech acts.  Now and again, a poem — or so we may think — is not an advertisement, a fraud, a con, or a spectacle but an event: “an experience,” as Badiou puts it, “whereby a certain kind of truth is constructed” (19).  Catching (and releasing), “Look, there!”

METHOD:

Q:  “What do you do when you first read a new or unfamiliar poem?  What are the processes and procedures that precede a settled ‘take’ or a considered evaluation or an elaborated critical argument?”

A:

1.  I read the poem, I read it again; I read it again.  I say, “What?”

2. I read the volume through, then I pick up Armantrout’s True.  Trying not to think like a post-graduate, I spot her first-grade poem, which ends “around and around / and away.”

3. A flash: to read “Spin,” I will follow that formula —

• around: the first section’s “dimensionless point” throws us from a Euclidean into a quantum world.  This is good, I think.

• around: the second section’s pundit praises a politician for round-about speech.  This is bad, I think, especially amidst the political, financial, and erotic chicanery that is the world of Money Shot.

• a way — risking a settled take, I shift away to a way and name that way a “poem.”  I pin down “Spin” as a poem that points, an objectivist poem that makes its point by pointing . . . and spinning.

4.  Test:  If this works, the spin that spun me now pins you, at least for a moment.  Poet to critic to reader: “look there!”

WORKS CITED

Armantrout, Rae.  Money Shot.  Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011.

------.  True.  Berkeley, CA: Atelos, 1998.

Badiou, Alain, with Nicolas Truong.  In Praise of Love.  Trans. Peter Bush.  London: Serpent’s Tail, 2012.

H.D., “The Pool.”  Collected Poems 1912-1944.  New York: New Directions, 1984.

Pound, Ezra. ABC of Reading.  New York: New Directions, 1934.

Sloterdijk, Peter.  In the World Interior of Capital.  Trans. Wieland Hoban,  Maldon, MA: Polity Press, 2013.

* * *

Rae Armantrout, “Spin”

That we are composed
of dimensionless points

which nonetheless spin,

which nonetheless exist
in space,

which is a mapping
of dimensions.

*

The pundit says
the candidate's speech
hit
“all the right points,”

hit “fed-up” but “not bitter,”
hit “not hearkening back.”

*

Light strikes our eyes
and we say, “Look there!”

* * *

Dee Morris is Professor Emerita at the University of Iowa, where she has taught courses in the expanded field of modern and contemporary poetics, including sound art, documentary, and the digital. She is most recently the author of How to Live/What to Do: H.D.’s Cultural Poetics (University of Illinois, 2003); an edited collection of essays, Sound States: Innovative Poetics and Acoustical Technologies; and a coedited collection, New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories (MIT, 2006). Her essays include “Minding Machines/Machining Minds: Writing (at) the Human-Machine Interface,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, and “Ticking Differently: H.D.’s Time in Philadelphia,” in MLA Approaches to Teaching H.D.’s Poetry and Prose.