Coffee Spoons, Coffeehouse Friends, & Rae Armantrout

Given: 1 life; measure in whatever units you like: coffee spoons (T. S. Eliot), full moons (Paul Bowles), morning walks to Peets (R L Swihart).

*

Coffeehouse friends are a different brew: commerce can be as lean as greetings, first names, the names of authors and books. From one such friend I received an unexpected (though long expected) gift this morning: Rae Armantrout's Versed (Signed: For Rex, From Rae Armantrout, 3-12-2011).

Other than a few glimpses I know next to nothing of Armantrout's poetry (see links below to Breytenbach's quote on "leaving a few marks"; to the reader reviews on Versed at Amazon), but eventually I'll try to post a fave poem(s) from this collection.

An initial reaction to the cover art: Sci-Fi (some robotic sculpture with a view onto an apocalyptic landscape, or the mountains around San Diego).

One of the four backcover blurbs:
"Armantrout's poetry has always been turned to the present moment. Its formal lineage is from William Carlos Williams and the Objectivists, with their enjambments of modern experience.... Poetically, Armantrout has always aimed at knowing life by isolating it from narrative. Written under a diagnosis of cancer ('I just called / to fill you in'), Versed is a major and moving addition to a life's work in many-angled reflections."
--Jeremy Noel-Tod, Times Literary Supplement 

*

On Breytenbach's "leaving a few marks": http://withoutliftingafinger.blogspot.com/2011/05/breytenbach-on-francois-krige-and-art.html

An array of reader reviews of Versed at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Versed-Wesleyan-Poetry-Rae-Armantrout/dp/0819568791


coffee spoons Pictures, Images and Photos


Comments

Post a Comment

POPULAR POSTS

Tarkovsky's Death and the Film "Stalker"

Several people involved in the film production — including Tarkovsky — had met deaths, which some crew members attribute to the film's long, arduous shooting schedule in toxic locations. Sound designer Vladimir Sharun recalls: We were shooting near Tallinn in the area around the small river Jägala with a half-functioning hydroelectric station. Up the river was a chemical plant and it poured out poisonous liquids downstream. There is even this shot in Stalker: snow falling in the summer and white foam floating down the river. In fact it was some horrible poison. Many women in our crew got allergic reactions on their faces. Tarkovsky died from cancer of the right bronchial tube. And Tolya Solonitsyn too. That it was all connected to the location shooting for Stalker became clear to me when Larisa Tarkovskaya died from the same illness in Paris. [ 6 ]   [From Wikipedia:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stalker_(film )]
Read more

TÜBINGEN, JANUARY by Paul Celan

T Ü BINGEN, JANUARY Eyes talked in- to blindness. Their  -- "a riddle, what is pure- ly arisen" --, their memory of floating H ö lderlintowers, gull- enswirled. Visits of drowned joiners to these plunging words: Came, if there came a man, came a man to the world, today, with the patriarchs' light-beard: he could, if he spoke of this time, he could only babble and babble, ever- ever- moremore. ("Pallaksch. Pallaksch.")* * Pallaksch A word that H ö lderlin, spending his last years in the home of a T ü bingen carpenter, was given to uttering in his dementia; it could signify Yes or No. [Poem Translated by John Felstiner; the explanation of Pallaksch is also from his "Notes" in Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan ]  
Read more

Hitchcock's Soda City

I was watching Saboteur last night (Encore has a slew of Hitchcock's films up now) and wanted to know more about Soda City. Figured it wasn't real. It's not. Apparently it was shot somewhere in Nevada (makes sense). This site gives a nice run-down of the various places throughout the US that Hitchcock used in his films: Hitchcock's America.
Read more

Coetzee's "Costello": Koba the Bear and Paul West

Image
Lesson 6: The Problem of Evil . Ok, but not my fave chapter: traverses an age-old subject and doesn't turn up much that is new (I mean Hannah Arendt new). One bit I dog-eared (also threw a Howgarthian line in with an exclamation mark) because I liked it so much (especially if I could widen its scope). The underlining is mine:    The routine censorship paper is liberal in its ideas, with perhaps a touch of the Kulturpessimismus  that has marked her thinking of late:  the civilization of the West is based on belief in unlimited and illimitable endeavour; it is too late for us to do anything about that, we must simply hold on tight and go wherever the ride takes us. It is on the subject of the illimitable that her opinions seem to be undergoing a quiet change. Reading West's book has contributed to that change, she suspects, though it is possible the change would have happened anyway, for reasons that are more obscure to her. Specifically, she is no longer sure that people are
Read more