I didn’t previously know Pulitzer prize-winning, West Coast Language poet Rae Armantrout or her work, though we had conversed. She asked if I would mind her seat. Of all the possible choices of text available to me to respond, I chose  “of course”, which now seems somewhat prosaic.

If I have understood – or interpreted – correctly (if there can be a “correct” understanding), for Armantrout, language is the thing from which meanings emerge. She likes to place/write into her poems two sorts of language: the public – the language we use socially; and the private – our thoughts. She expects these will conflict with each other to reveal new meanings, and from which the reader (though less so the listener – see below) can make new interpretations. Her poetry is thus duplicitous in the sense of its ability to contain opposing forces.

It reminds of Woody Allen’s thought bubbles revealing discrepancy between what is said and what is meant, in his film Annie Hall, or MAK Halliday’s notion of language creating meaning potential, in his deep structure linguistic theories of the 1970s, around the time the West Coast Language poets emerged.

Rae Armantrout was one of that school; the best, some say. That evening, she had been invited to read at Washington’s Phillip’s Collection gallery in response to their Man Ray – Human Equations exhibition, as part of the same OB Hardison poetry series of which the Simon Armitage and Peter Oswald event was a part.

Man Ray has been described as “difficult”; Armantrout, too. In the New Yorker Dan Chiasson describes her as writing “tantalisingly hard poems”. Indeed, and more so when taken aurally rather than from the page, where you can at least re-read and reflect. In Washington DC’s open-mic poetry events I witnessed a phenomenon for the first time - audience members approvingly clicking fingers at some phrase that resonates, catches them unawares, what Edward Hirsch describes as being “stung” or “pierced” by a poem. As a buttoned-up Brit, I could not take to it but wondered if some form of it (a meaningful cough, perhaps?), might have been useful at this reading, as a sort of request stop, a plea: I think I have been stung. Could you just say that again? And you do want – need - to hear it again, as some phrase tantalises before the mists swirl back and steal it from you.

In describing her work’s possible relationship to that of Man Ray, Armantrout refers to his desire to mix unrelated elements to produce something new, creating conditions in which explosions of diverse meanings are possible. Just as in her work, she suggested, seemingly incongruous ideas create tension between the hyper-rational and the irrational. Confessing herself a “physics groupie”, she likes to include scientific elements in her poetry – as Ray used mathematical models - and then “anthropomorphise” them. I was struggling at this point without a specific example, which arrived in the form of Hamlet’s nipple.

The Man Ray image used in the Hardison poetry series brochure entry for this evening was that of Twelfth Night, appropriate for Armantrout’s question: what manner of man was Man? With the aid of slides, Armantrout commented on, and read a poem in response to, each of a selection of Ray’s exhibits. In response to his Shakespearean Equation, Hamlet, Rae raised Ray’s mysogny, as she saw it. The image appears as a polyhedron with gently curving sides. But it was the nipple painted at one edge with its venous cracks suggestive of a female breast to which she drew our attention. “Did Man Ray have a gender problem?” she wondered out loud. A theme to which she repeatedly returned, citing more examples of Ray’s use of fleshy curves and anatomical images to render them erotic, usually female.

The first image, she paired with a new poem, ‘Taking Place’, handwritten and copied for each audience member: “Once we liked the conspicuous/But constrained/The push-up bra/Under the shirt-waist/A small bow at the throat/The appearance of a struggle/Toward the diminutive/The punctum.”

On initial inspection of that image, the nipple had appeared, to the audience, unconstrained but inconspicuous, but you could see her point. I wondered if her the slender/second hand/jerking forward … might also have been a comment on the manner of Ray’s manhood. If so, it passed without mention.

Armantrout is considered one of the avant garde group known as the West Coast Language poets, influenced by such modernists as William Carlos Williams, who Armantrout considers a major influence on her work, and who associated with a group, The Others, co-founded by Man Ray. What goes around …

She puts her mind to big questions - matter, energy, metaphysics, time - and reminds us of how we enjoy trying to understand such phenomena. But we are people, and people have all kinds of troubling entanglements, out of which different meanings and interpretations arise, ‘Entanglement’ being her poem about that word’s various meanings. I suppose I find more accessible the RD Laing school of knotty entanglements, and had difficulty following all of Armantrout’s poems, for all their brevity. But these are clearly meant for reading on the page. For me, one of the more aurally accessible was ‘Flo’:

 

   This agent, Flo,

     who is above it all

     but enthusiastic too

     like the Dalai Lama,

     has become/

     is becoming

    an American icon.

 

And so it went: another image shown, another comment on Man Ray’s apparent misogyny or "gender problems": look, those are a woman’s eyes on that metronome; and another of Rae’s poems with her thoughts on how they might link, though you were never quite sure she was convinced about the connections. Well, I wasn’t, and looked forward to the question and answer session for enlightenment. This last particularly as I was as intrigued by her commentary as much as – no, more than – her reading of her poems. I jotted down intriguing snippets: "like my poems, Man Ray raises questions of what a whole is, what body is; what makes the self cohere? ‘Flock together’ we say when we don’t say ‘opposites attract’." I was getting confused, but at a higher level, and couldn’t wait for the question and answer session which I was convinced would be the evening’s highlight, with all those fuses Armantrout had set fizzing. What better way to start an interview than to pick one of those up and run with it: What did you mean by Man Ray having “gender problems”? In your poem, 'Chirality' you ask:  would I oscillate in two or three dimensions?  How does this relate to Man Ray’s need for more than one unrelated factor, and your compositions of seemingly incongruous ideas?

But I wasn’t doing the interview and, if I was, wouldn’t have been quick enough to have thought up such questions on the spot. That was left to Guy Raz, who skilfully steered us away from her controversial thesis on Man’s masculinity towards more personal stuff like how she works as a writer. Yes, I was disappointed but, to be fair, how do you ask questions of a "difficult" poet like Rae Armantrout? For the record, she is less concerned with metre than cadence. Her mother having read iambic poetry to her, as a teenager she wanted “to break that up”. She read William Carlos Williams and other modernists. She loves integrating abstract ideas with concrete notions, particularly borrowing from science. She reluctantly accepts her reputation for being “difficult”, poetically speaking: “Perhaps sometimes I am trying to be tricky. I try to reproduce that puzzlement the world presents.” And, perhaps diplomatically, backtracking a little: “Man Ray is not the only misogynist.”

Raz sensitively raised the question of her illness, a rare form of cancer from which she has apparently recovered: “I was always hypochondriac, so when I was diagnosed I said, Oh, there it is.The sense of mortality made me even more driven.” This put me in mind of these lines from her poem ‘Chirality’:

   

    Ask what it means

     to pass through the void.

 

     Ask how it differs

     from not passing.

 

Rae Armantrout teaches at the University of California, San Diego, where she is professor of poetry and poetics, has published 10 books of poetry and featured in a number of anthologies. Amongst many awards she received the Pulitzer for Versed in 2010, and her latest volume Just Saying was published in 2013.

The event was organised by Teri Cross Davis, director of the OB Hardison series of poetry readings for the Folger Shakespeare Library. You can find the next two on our  poetry gig guide: Mother Tongue: Poetry in Translation and Rita Dove.

Man Ray–Human Equations: A Journey from Mathematics to Shakespeare runs until 10 May 2015. The exhibition is organized by the Phillips Collection and The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

I highly recommend a visit to the Phillips Collection, with its two Van Goghs, Renoir’s the Boating Party luncheon, its Braques, Matisse, Paul Klee and even a work by the Lake District’s forgotten WW2 refugee artist Kurt Schwitters.

 

PHOTOGRAPH: JULIAN JORDON / WRITE OUT LOUD