Rae Armantrout

I am attracted to looking at the different things language can mean even in one sometimes quite ordinary utterance. Writing is partly…

— Rae Armantrout

“this route is only one of several imaginary paths.”

— Rae Armantrout

“To reinvent anomalous figments.”

— Rae Armantrout

I know you by your willingness.

— Rae Armantrout

People probably long for something genuinely personal in a society where the personal is often indistinguishable from the "personalized." Maybe the poetry…

— Rae Armantrout

“The jacaranda, for instance, is beautiful but not serious.”

— Rae Armantrout

Like most of my poems, 'Lie' has several sources: I read a very troubling book called The Sixth Extinction. I took note…

— Rae Armantrout

Poets tend to form loose groups - the "Romantics" or the "Imagists". And sometimes they write manifestoes in the name of these…

— Rae Armantrout

“Evening succeeds evening.”

— Rae Armantrout

The ghosts swarm. They speak as one person. Each has left something undone.

— Rae Armantrout

Metaphor is ritual sacrifice. It kills the look-alike. No, metaphor is homeopathy.

— Rae Armantrout

Carried by light, images remain while sensation is so evanescent as to be always beyond belief.

— Rae Armantrout

“The feeling of emptiness is a pre-existing condition. Jargon forces intimacy.”

— Rae Armantrout

Like all my poems, 'Negotiations' has several sources. It deals with aging lovers and the often silent deals they make. Thinking about…

— Rae Armantrout

clarity need not be equivalent to / readability. How readable is the world?

— Rae Armantrout

I tend to like the way poets form communities. Writing can be lonely after all. Modern life can be lonely. Poets do…

— Rae Armantrout

“I'm composed largely of what the streets and rooms look like, of how to arrive 'just' here.”

— Rae Armantrout

“Proscenium of nearly identical mountain ridges, arched out and downward, one 'after' another, to the valley floor: curtains tied back, a gesture”

— Rae Armantrout

This is a strange book: visionary and dark. It stutters out a kind of music: repeated phrases which accumulate errors and mutate…

— Rae Armantrout

The crowd is made of little gods, and there is still no heaven.

— Rae Armantrout

“A receipt blown crazily across the parking lot, was, perhaps, a moth.”

— Rae Armantrout

“A sense of mission lost in ink's jagged outcrops. I was trying to tell myself what I must have known before in…

— Rae Armantrout

The fear that all this will end. The fear that it won't.

— Rae Armantrout

“So much happiness is caged in language, ready to burst out anytime and fade”

— Rae Armantrout

“Mozart creates a universe out of pleasantries.”

— Rae Armantrout