Seeming is Believing
Rae Armantrout
Veil: New and Selected Poems
Wesleyan University Press, 2001
$30 (cloth) / $16.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8195-6450-8
Whether what we sense of this world
is the what of this world only, or the what
of which of several possible worlds
—which what?—something of what
we sense
may be true, may be the world, what is,
what we sense.
For the rest, a truce is possible...
—William Bronk, "Metonymy as an Approach to the Real World"
While American poetry has harbored its
share of chroniclers, transcendentalists,
dreamers, confessors, and exhibitionists,
it has not quite teemed with skeptics. We
have Emily Dickinson's barbed lyrics, certainly;
and Stevens, despite his high-gloss settings,
knew a thing or two about fool's gold, but
few poets have made careers out of really
gnawing at our assumptions about
reality with the single-mindedness of the
late William Bronk, or, in our time, with
the uncanny brilliance of Rae Armantrout.
Dickinson famously noted that she knew she
was reading poetry if she felt as if the
top of her head were taken off. Ron Silliman
discerns a similar effect in Armantrout
when, in his foreword to Veil. New and
Selected Poems, he classes her work
with "...the literature of the anti-lyric,
those poems that at first glance appear
contained and perhaps even simple, but which
upon the slightest examination rapidly provoke
a sort of vertigo effect as element after
element begins to spin wildly toward more
radical...possibilities." And vertiginous
they are. Armantrout spirits away some gravitational
force we've gotten used to—an idea,
a word, a "fact" that may not
have existed to begin with—leaving
us "at the charmed verges of presence"
[3], unsupported by our discredited prior
knowledge, swaying uneasily above unfamiliar
terrain we thought we knew. Like William
Bronk, she calls to our attention the overlooked
chinks and fissures in the linguistic exoskeleton
that stands between us and the experiences
it envelops. Throughout her literary career,
Armantrout has titled her books—Made
to Seem, Necromance, The Pretext,
The Veil—to suggest that modes
of deception, whether naturally occurring
or consciously designed by commercial and
political entities, distort our apprehension
of who we are and of what surrounds us.
Like Dorothy, she has glimpsed the all-powerful
Wizard of Oz at home reading the Wall
Street Journal, and understands that
an ever increasing percentage of what's
presented as being "true" is concocted
by advertising agencies, television newsmongers,
and government spin doctors. And language—the
medium within which all this corporate pseudo-reality
is packaged—is no help when "Ventriloquy
/ is the mother tongue." [56] It's
collusive, part of the banal sorcery.
But Armantrout is not simply interested
in passing her hand through the mirages
("The chosen/contexts of display, //arrangement
and arrival." [51]); she assumes that
we can recognize them on our own. Of more
importance is the moment of recognition
itself and the dilemma of uncertainty that
results when notions of authority dissipate.
In "As We're Told" (another freighted
title), a new poem, she writes, "Any
fence maintains the other/side is 'without
form,'" [120] an observation that could
as easily apply to the cultural arrogance
of nations as to individuals. Authority
rests—tenuously—with subjective,
often gender-skewed perception, an idea
pointedly if comically illustrated in "Theories":
What if one
pretends
to restrain
the other
while the
other
seems
to rotate
helplessly
faster
and faster?
Each finds
his mate
pre-
dictable
but believes
his own
rigidity
must excite his partner [118-119]
We are naked emperors convinced of our fine fashion sense, and pretending,
seeming, believing are mechanisms of self-deception, each one a method
of avoidance, a strategy invoked in opposition to thought. In "Near
Rhyme" rational thought is directly counterpoised to belief:
"I resent believing / there is someone else present / while I
think there isn't." [96] And who has not gone through the guilty
motions of public prayer or pledge to mollify others, to keep up the
collective illusion of faith when faith is beside the point, almost
an insult to the reality of catastrophic moments that require action
or compassion rather than unconscious recitations? "What if,"
as she asks in "Inside Out," "God's only message /
is 'Repeat after me?'" [145]
It's this kind of honesty that keeps Armantrout from sounding blithely
cynical or thick-skinned. She betrays little bitterness or resentment
in conveying her disillusionments—which seem hard-won and painstakingly
articulated—but instead imparts a sense of discovery, of transformation.
Her hunger for the truth of things and argument for a language capable
of embodying it may conjure the cranky ghost of Laura (Riding) Jackson,
but Armantrout's polemics are more transparent and subtle, "convincing"—to
borrow words from Mark Van Doren—"in the simple way of poetry,
the way that leaves us unaware of anything to be convinced about."
Hers is a filtering consciousness, not an overtly emotional or explicitly
political one (though of course neither of those elements is entirely
absent), and as such her poems seem to carry the unbiased weight of
documentary evidence, or science.
In reading Veil I found a surprise on nearly every page, my
regret on finishing one poem dispelled only by the anticipation of
reading the next and by the promise of further surprises on rereading.
The book is a striking, substantial collection by a poet who—in
a disillusioned literary universe—would be widely acknowledged
as one of our finest. That acknowledgment will certainly come, though
I suspect that Armantrout will feel some small pang of doubt when
it does.
