Poet's Corner: Rae Armantrout

I finished Versed by Rae Armantrout, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 2010. I liked many of the poems, and I liked specific lines in many of them. Here are some favorites.

[This one seems very timely.]

Previews

AMERICA

The playboy scion of a weapons company repents. His company, he sees now, is corrupt, his weapons being sold (behind his back) to strong men. Alone, he builds a super weapon in the shape of a man. Now, more powerful and more innocent than ever before, he attacks.

HAPPENING

The train halts. An engineer tells us we’re stopped because we’ve lost touch with the outside world. Things are happening ahead, but we don’t know what they are. This could represent an act of war. We stand in a field, no longer passengers.

---

[Some I can't find whole to cut-and-paste.]

from "Relations"

Bring me the friendship

between solving
and dissolving.

---

Unbidden

The ghosts swarm.
They speak as one
person. Each
loves you. Each
has left something
undone.

*

Did the palo verde
blush yellow
all at once?

Today's edges
are so sharp

they might cut
anything that moved.

*

The way a lost
word

will come back
unbidden.

You're not interested
in it now,

only
in knowing
where it's been.

[I like the last section especially. It is a good example of how poetry can name something that is nebulous]

( More Rae Armantrout poems & bits of poems )

My poems

Here are two poems based on prompts from 52 by Jo Bell.

In this one, you are supposed to look at your naked body in a mirror (!!!) That's pretty much the last thing I want to do, so I only did a variation on a haiku.

Poem #3 by okapi

adipose curtain
doubled-edged un-valentine
scars knock, wanting snacks

---

[And this one the prompt is an invitation, and I did it arranged it like Rae Armantrout's "Later"]

Invitations by okapi

1. Nerves

2:18 AM
envelope re-sealed thrice
check-re-check
driving without a
_______.

would you be so kind
as to go?
I hear the ether is
nice this time of year.


2. Legion & the Legionnaire

How long until hate clots,
synchronized like menstrual cycles,
latch to their respective walls

and block flows?

May I please invite you to embrace your like-minded kin?
Oh, won’t you please

coagulate?

3. Nausea when you know what I thought you knew, making my prior knowing an infidelity (or a crime). Dinner plates clattering after the fight. Shunned devices calling shotgun for the frequencies of their white noise. That unreliable watch (sign of the un-times) which won’t be replaced. Why don’t you all just join that cheerful email in the trash?

4. RSVP. Soon. Please.

The pot is
boiling over.

Subtitled, you lounge on
the beach
while tentacles wrap round my leg.

I emerge from the waves.
You shout.

It will have to be amputated.