“I’m pretty depressed and terrified,” Rae Armantrout told an interviewer in 2022, “it seems like human beings just can’t get it together to take any action about global warming even though the disasters are completely apparent now and they’re coming faster and faster.”[1] These concerns come through in the poet’s latest collection, rich with allusions to the climate crisis, artificial intelligence, and other man-made dangers. Such themes pair well with Armantrout’s iconic version of Language poetry and her interest in quantum physics. However, some of the poems in this collection also turn a critical eye on the efficacy of her own poetics in our current world of constant calamity.
Go Figure is Armantrout’s fifteenth book with Wesleyan University Press since 2001, beginning with Veil, the first of two new and selected collections. Two of her books were finalists for the National Book Award, and her collection Versed (2009) won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. Armantrout has continued in her unique style over the years, with short poems whose meaning lies between what can appear to be disparate strands of thought, imagery, or even ad copy. This book continues the tradition of using two to six short stanzas, sometimes in numbered sections or separated by a divider.
Armantrout appears to continue her practice of incorporating things she comes across in her daily life and reading as imagery in her poems, such as the pink pig lawn ornament in “Attempts” or the “[y]ellow racing stripe / on the single snail / on a hot sidewalk” that begins the poem, “Reporting”. Vivid descriptions of nature are also common throughout, as in “Fractal” where the speaker wonders if she were a plant, whether she would look
like this green one —
a field of rockets
each nippled with
hard cones?
The poems call to mind items one might come across on an average trip to the market, but readers can’t miss the loaded language of a pig whose body is “made of an oil drum” with “pipes for legs” and Roman cauliflower sexualized and likened to military ordnance.
Armantrout’s keen interest in quantum physics – a feature in her poetics since her first chapbook, which featured a poem titled after Einstein’s “Special Theory of Relativity” – comes through in this collection in poems referencing the Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli, known for his theories on quantum gravity. “In Practice” is dedicated to Rovelli and the earlier poem “What to Call It” appears to reference the physicist’s Loop Quantum Gravity theory — a conception of genesis that diverges from the Big Bang, as it’s currently understood — with the speaker beginning,
“Bang” is a metaphor
as is “explode.”
We might as well say,
“exponential growth.”
Hydrogen filaments
extending
between clumps
of dark matter
As she has done since her earliest collection, Armantrout uses loaded phrases as poem titles — as with “Escape Velocity”, which begins with flower imagery as metaphor for dividing and the title referring to the velocity needed to escape the gravity field of another object. The speaker brings numerous dichotomies to mind with such open lines as
mirror-image
at the core —
matter and
its opposite number,
bad actors both.
Who is escaping who? Was Armantrout thinking of sexual intimacy, the political binaries the U.S. seems stuck with, groups of people with sharply diverging worldviews, or something else entirely? The range of readings that her lines produce in the mind are more meaningful than any interview answer.
“Be More” links the dangers of artificial intelligence, social media, and wildfires to show their destructive and self-sustaining nature. After pointing out that now “the dead get jobs / answering FAQs”, alluding to the training of AI bots with archived texts, in the first of four numbered sections, section two addresses “Surveillance Inc.” and social media prodding for more and more personal information to “Be more recognizable!” Section three uses the image of a heat-generated pyroculumus cloud to convey the destructive, wildfire force of this information gathering
The fires are quite precocious.
They generate lightning
which creates more fire —
almost fully self-sustaining
in a matter of hours.
While the collection’s 92 poems aren’t divided into sections, Armantrout groups thematically-linked poems, as with “Flame,” “Disasterville,” and “Bushwhack,” a triptych of poems sharing a wildfire theme over consecutive pages. Wildfires – a more tangible problem for the poet who lives on the West Coast where these fires rage and destroy – are again a theme of “Freeze Tag,” which alludes to the urgency of the climate crisis that shows more signs of its existence each year in severe weather, including wildfires. The speaker paints a vivid, but ambiguous portrait evoking not only the beauty of nature, but the horror of what humans are doing to it in the lines, “In fall when the trees / go up in flames.” The poem goes through the succession of seasons in a way that can seem innocuous, even pastoral, until the last discordant lines make the tension overt, “In spring when, / full of toxins, we’re interred / in today’s clothes.”
The speaker of “Preparedness” addresses mankind’s lack of urgent action to prepare for, or take action to reverse, climate change. After beginning with a vague allusion, “Animals find us eerie. / We can see what’s coming / in broad strokes,” and likening humankind to ghosts for not doing anything about what they see, Armantrout’s speaker suggests a hypothesis that the topic is all too abstract for us to deal with, concluding “That’s one way to explain / our failure to prepare.”
Although some poems seem to mourn mankind’s failure, others like “Magazines” allude to specific causes of the crisis, linking environmental damage to passing fads like hairstyles and parades. In the first section, the reader sees a “Perfect parade-balloon goblin / with his permanent sneer,” while section two begins with the lines “Thaw-chimneys blow / trapped carbon / through weakened permafrost” suggesting the extent of the environmental damage by asking if the reader remembers the hairstyle called “permanents,” and bringing the trend to mind with the image of “white ladies / in rows / thumbing magazines” as they wait for their hair to set.
In “Simply”, the speaker suggests that mankind has been destructive from the start, beginning with a quoted description of man’s evolutionary ancestors as “molecular machines” using “freely available” energy — a benign description of a destructive species, the speaker points out, before asking a poignant question:
Our earliest ancestors
were accelerants.
They ate change.
Where does that leave us?
This poem includes another of Armantrout’s concerns in Go Figure, with the speaker questioning whether her poetic method of describing problems in creative ways actually helps, ending with an allusion to species extinction by paraphrasing an English nursery rhyme,
Ladybug, ladybug,
fly away home.
Your house is on fire.
Your children
The poem ends there abruptly, and suggestively, leaving out the last two words of the nursery rhyme’s final line: “are gone.”
Armantrout questions her own efficacy in other poems including “Seeing Reason,” where the speaker deals with feelings of helplessness that come from living in a world that once responded to problems she pointed out, but that now has too many obvious problems without action. She longs for a return to simpler times when people “saw reason” when presented with a problem, rather than simply inventing an alternative narrative where such problems don’t exist.
“Stranger” presents another view by likening poets to junk collectors: “I wanted strangers to admire my poems; / he wanted strangers to admire his junk.” While there is no mention in the poem of who “he” is, I imagined an unstable man shouting about the evils of the world, given Armantrout’s criticism of her poetic style as simply pointing out problems. Feelings of helplessness to change the situation come through clearly.
Some poems like “Smidgens” feature a metapoetic speaker who employs poignant similes regarding the poetic arts. This speaker tells us that
Poetry hates itself
the way a child
pretends to fall
and looks around
to see who notices.
The same way a “single smidgen / wants to disappear.” However, in the next section, Poetry also loves itself “the way a baby / loves pleasure.” Other poems highlight the poet’s preoccupation with words and meaning, including in such trivialities as advertising copy. In “Reverb”, the speaker comments on her poetics and the words she likes to use, referring to herself, or Armantrout, in the third person:
“Lake-washed chinos,”
the ad said, flashing quickly
across the screen.
She didn’t wonder
what lake they were washed in
or who did the washing. Clearly
no one had washed anything.
She did wonder why someone would think
that someone would think that
“lake-washing” was desirable.
Was it about the remote spot
the words made her see?
She wrote this down
because she recognized it
as a thought — the kind she liked.
Or used to like. One with depth,
with reverb.
In the 46 years since Armantrout published her debut poetry chapbook, Extremities, rather than changing her style, she’s come close to perfecting it. While some readers are undoubtedly put off by this enigmatic poetry, with its difficult search for meaning, the many who have come to know and love it will be satisfied by Armantrout’s latest poetic reflections on the state of our world. Even as the poet questions their worth herself, she continues to address the important conversations in her unique way in poems that can be read over and over.
[Published by Wesleyan University Press on August 6, 2024, $27.00/$16.95 hardcover/paperback]
[1] Between the Covers, 6/19/22 https://tinhouse.com/podcast/rae-armantrout-finalists/