Rae Armantrout, “Further Thought” & “Here I Go”
During a visit to the Writers House during which she joined an interactive ModPo webcast and gave a poetry reading, Rae Armantrout also joined Al Filreis, Laynie Browne, and Julie Bloch in our Wexler Studio to record an episode of PoemTalk. We talked about two poems in Rae’s book Go Figure. The poems are “Here I Go” and “Further Thought.” Rae’s PennSound author page didn’t yet have any recordings of performances of poems from this new book, so we asked the poet to read them during the podcast session.
Come back next month for our episode featuring Aldon Nielsen, Erica Hunt, Billy Joe Harris, and Simone White, who join me to help honor the late Tyrone Williams with a discussion of his poem “Charon on the Potomac.”
ModPo — our free, open, online course — features poem texts, audio recordings and filmed discussion of Rae Armantrout’s poems. You can see all these resources here. And Rae has herself been part of fourteen ModPo discussions; those are here.
Episode 207 of PoemTalk was directed and engineered by Zach Carduner, Magda Andrews-Hoke, and Makena Deveraux. And the episode was edited, as always, by Zach.
Find PoemTalk at Spotify or Apple Podcasts. We hope you will subscribe.
**
FURTHER THOUGHT
GENESIS 2
When words first had meanings
that lasted,
that hung in the air
after their occasions
had dissolved,
it was eerie.
I get that.
Words were gods—
arbitrary, deathless.
Not every bird or bush would talk,
but the idea that any might
was palpable.
To be at the source and not
see it
must have driven people mad.
REVELATIONS 2
“This means that;”
No, that means this!”
the twins say,
urgently.
The mystery of the seven stars
and the mystery of the seven candle sticks.
Balance
on one foot
as long as
you can
HERE I GO
1
“Here I go again”
was a rock anthem once,
crowds on their feet
mouthing the words.
2
There’s no way to explain
how faultlessly I want to write
about how pointless all this is.
Nothing I can point to, but
the gesture itself,
the way it comes to seem
anachronistic, spectral--
like this ongoing attempt
to catalog the world
by latching each thing
to the last
memory it calls up.
Nothing recalls
the new cat-6
haboob.
3
But I’m hard to discourage.
When a branch lays out five--
like an old card trick--
identical white orchids,
three-petalled light sails spread,
ready to go—each with a small
bat face in the middle