Updated: Oct 13
“I meant what I said”: Rae Armantrout’s Safe Rooms
by Cici Liu
In the cosmology of Rae Armantrout, the world is meanings all the way down. Armed with a characteristic attunement to the intricacies of language, her upcoming collection, Safe Rooms, takes us through the dreamlike world of connotations that sleep beneath our everyday speech. At times sardonic and sincere, prescient and present, Armantrout offers a clear-eyed vivisection of the words we lean on to make sense of our lives: “What supports us / is flimsy,” she points out. Refracted in the sparse verse of her poems, the veil of familiarity over our everyday phrases falls away, revealing a heightened clarity and strangeness.
If Safe Rooms seems at times difficult, its diction terse, and its enormous leaps between sections disorienting, it is because Armantrout is a master of defamiliarization. This collection is driven by an inability to take anything for granted, and the words we utter without a second thought are given all the thought; idioms are magnified to examine every pore. In “Point at Which,” the titular phrase explodes into literalism, conjuring the image of “thrusting / one finger // down, // as if squashing / an ant.” In “Kinks,” the erotic image of “electrical wire // around the bare pole” is suddenly interrupted with “Ritual bankruptcy: / kink in the supply chain.” When these dully quotidian phrases sneak their way into poetry, where words stack in a delicate balancing act between sound and sense, they receive a renewed, curious attention. She prompts us to ask: what do we mean by these banalities? Armantrout’s careful explosions do not make ordinary language extraordinary, but rather refract it into new spaces, where, removed from its usual context, its meaning suddenly becomes malleable. She disassembles a phrase like reducing a car to its parts, its strange mechanisms only revealed when the exterior is pointed out as an exterior, when the surface ripples and gives way. “That whiff of ozone // given off when / meaning gets stretched beyond // what anyone intended— / you can get a taste for it,” she admits. Armantrout’s titles, never longer than four words, are hot iron under the hammer; connotations fly off like sparks and grow into lines and sections. The poem “Bridge” gives the back-to-back injunctions that “No one should be lonely. / Show your work,” the connections between people coinciding with the connections between problem and answer. “Jitters” jump from the anxieties of the poet to the Zitterbewegung (German: jitter motion) of light waves.
Not every poem works in this methodical, rhetorical way, but it’s a consistent enough practice that the exercise becomes a tic, betrays a kind of anxiety. The lies that we tell ourselves wilt in the face of Armantrout’s restless, shrewd examination, yet in moments when this examination merges with self-scrutiny, she seems haunted by the suspicion that it is, in fact, lies all the way down. “Perhaps the real / is merely the consistent,” she frets. An unease nips at the heart of this collection, the worry that the desire to strip words of their colloquial complacence is its own pantomime. “Maybe I want too much / from poems, // more than any poem can give,” she admits. A dogged critic of unconscious utterances, even her own habits come under intense scrutiny; even the the ultimate gap of interpretation between author and reader suggests to her a kind of performative uncertainty: “Why is it I want to write / something that seems right // only on second thought / and even then leaves doubt // as to what it might mean / in the mind of a reader? // Am I on the fence / or am I hiding, // playing hide and seek, / keeping my options open?” With distinct, dogged attention, Armantrout uncovers these uneasy and isolating suspicions with her terse, implacable examination, sparing nothing.
If Armantrout is indeed playing hide and seek, these moments of self-questioning and almost-lyrical vulnerability are the closest she comes to standing out in the open, daring us to seek her. Amidst the brilliant incision, restless scrutiny, and unpredictable connections, Armantrout has her own folksy beckons to the reader. “As you’ve heard,” she gestures as she relays the tale of Daphne and Apollo. “I won’t keep you long,” she hedges as the collection nears its end. Speaking to us this way, Armantrout seems the clear-eyed friend whose dazzling cerebral celerity we can barely keep up with, and who, with these sudden pangs of affection, leads us by the hand towards our own insights on our language, our world, us. Armantrout is at once the poet of relentless self-reflection and the inviting mirror through whom we can begin our examination of ourselves.
RAE ARMANTROUT is a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Professor Emerita of Writing at UC San Diego. Her collection Versed won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award and was also a finalist for the National Book Award.
CICI LIU is a graduate student of English at Florida State University. She received a bachelor’s degree in Poetry Writing from the University of Virginia. She is currently working on 18th-century material culture and the public sphere.