POETRY
RAE
ARMANTROUT
Our National Treasure, Rae
Armantrout, is a
professor of writing in the literature department at the University ofCalifornia
at San Diego. She has also taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts,
Bard College, Naropa University, San Diego State University, and San Francisco
State University.
Armantrout’s
tenth book of poetry, Money Shot, was
published by Wesleyan University Press in February 2011. Her previous poetry
collections include Versed (Wesleyan
2009), which received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics
Circle Award for Poetry, and was a finalist for the National Book Award; Next Life (Wesleyan 2007), which was
selected by Publishers Weekly as one
of the best poetry books of 2007; Up to
Speed(Wesleyan 2003), also selected by Publishers
Weekly as one of the best poetry books of the year in 2003; and Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan,
2001), which was a finalist in the Poetry category for the 2002 PEN Center USA
Literary Awards. She has been published in many anthologies, including The Oxford Book of American Poetry and Scribner’s Best American Poetry of 1998, 2001, 2002, 2004, 2007, 2008,
and 2011, and in such magazines as Harpers,
The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Boston
Review, Chicago Review, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. She has
also received awards from the Guggenheim Foundation (2008), the Fund for Poetry
(1999 and 1994) and the California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship
(1989). Her collected prose was published in 2007.
Armantrout
was born in Vallejo, California, and earned her A.B. at University of
California at Berkeley (1970), and her M.A. at San Francisco State University
(1975). She lives in San Diego, California.
Simple
for Aaron Korkegian
Complex systems can arise
from simple rules.
It’s not
that we want to survive,
it’s that we’ve been drugged
and made to act
as if we do
while all the while
the sea breaks
and rolls, painlessly, under.
If we’re not copying it,
we’re lonely.
Is this the knowledge
that demands to be
passed down?
Time is made from swatches
of heaven and hell.
If we’re not killing it,
we’re hungry.
PREVIEWS
AMERICA
The playboy scion of a weapons company repents. His company,
he sees now, is corrupt, his weapons being sold (behind his
back) to strong men. Alone, he builds a super weapon in the shape of a man.
Now, more powerful and more innocent than ever before, he attacks.
HAPPENING
The train halts. An engineer tells us we’re stopped because
we’ve
lost touch with the outside world. Things are happening
ahead, but we don’t know what they are. This
could represent an act of war. We stand
in a field, no longer passengers.
“Simple” and “Previews” are reprinted from the poetry book Versed
by Rae Armantrout, published by Welseyan University Press, copyright © 2010 Rae
Armantrout [by permission.]
Versed is available for sale online at: www.amazon.com/Versed-Wesleyan-Poetry-Rae-Armantrout