Rae\nArmantrout<\/a>, a San Diego native famous for her terse, funny,\nbrainy poems, visited Miami to read from her poems last April. Thanks to\ngenerous funding from the Clark Capstone Fund, Armantrout was in Oxford for\nseveral days to visit classes and meet with students for individual\nconferences. Author of over ten collections of poetry and a memoir, Armantrout won<\/a>\nthe Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critic\u2019s Circle Award for her 2009\nbook Versed<\/em>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Miami MFA student Trevor Root is a fan of Armantrout\u2019s mercurial, skeptical style. Thanks to Trevor for contributing the following appreciation of Armantrout\u2019s poem \u201cBardos\u201d to the blog:<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n While\nreading through Rae Armantrout\u2019s Partly<\/em>,\nI found myself drawn to single lines. This wasn\u2019t necessarily the most\nefficient way to approach reading, but it did allow me to unravel Armantrout\u2019s\nconsistently tight, condensed poems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In\n\u201cBardos,\u201d the line which caught my attention first was the opening line of the\nsecond section: <\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\nvolume speak volumes<\/p>\n\n\n\n This\nstruck me in two ways. First, it responds directly to the topic of disquiet.\nSecond, it seems to elucidate the function of friction in Armantrout’s work;\nthe volume of linguistic friction and content non-sequiturs speaks for itself\nand moves the poems whether the poems are willing to move with it or not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But\na poem usually isn’t just one line, and this poem in fact has four sections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In\nthe first,<\/p>\n\n\n\n Some\nsay the soul<\/p>\n\n\n\n hangs\nfrom the ceiling<\/p>\n\n\n\n In\nthe second,<\/p>\n\n\n\n One\nclaims<\/p>\n\n\n\n he\ncan recreate the sound<\/p>\n\n\n\n of\na family argument<\/p>\n\n\n\n In\nthe third, <\/p>\n\n\n\n One uses leathery<\/p>\n\n\n\n maroon\ntongues<\/p>\n\n\n\n And\nfinally, in the fourth, <\/p>\n\n\n\n I’ve\nbeen telling someone<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Bardos”\nis a poem about telling, and the failure of telling, and it ends without\nactually communicating what the speaker wants to communicate. That isn’t just\nmy reading, it’s quite literal. The poem ends on the unfinished prepositional\nclause which promises to tell us why the killer is a hypocrite. It’s very\ndirect: the friction of hypocrisy carries the argument itself, regardless of\nwhat conditions or qualifies the hypocrisy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Bardos”\nis also a poem about between-ness, and death, and distraction, and how trauma\nvoyeurism serves as an antidote to the boredom forced on us by the fact that we\naren’t dead yet. None of that is very comforting and then it kind of just ends,\nmuch like life, which feels like far too epiphanic of a conclusion to the close\nreading of a poem which tells me it’s failing to tell me something, but oh\nwell. <\/p>\n\n\n\n