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The Craft Talk
So that the best thing you could do, it seemed, was climb inside the machine that was language
and feel what it wanted or was capable of doing at any point, steering only occasionally.
The best thing was to let language speak its piece while standing inside it—not like a knight in
armor exactly, not like a mascot in a chicken suit.
The best thing was to create in the reader or listener an uncertainty as to where the voice she
heard was coming from so as to frighten her a little.
Why should I want to frighten her?
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Describing the poems in Rae Armantrout‘s latest book, Go Figure, Library Journal says, ‘”she has honed enduring art on the ephemera that constitute a consciousness in motion through the present.” Charles Bernstein says, “Her sheer, often hilarious, ingenuity is an aesthetic triumph.” Armantrout’s 2018 book, Wobble, was a finalist for the National Book Award that year. In 2010 Versed won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals including Poetry, Conjunctions, Lana Turner, The Nation, The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, Harpers, The Paris Review, Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology and several editions of The Best American Poetry.
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Man in chicken suit, 1900