Rae Armantrout

Difficulty
June 9, 2013 Armantrout Rae

Difficulty

 

It’s difficult

not to be sentimental

 

about the sun

at first,

 

or when it first

slides out

 

from between

clouds

 

and we say it has

“returned”.

 

But I should back up

and explain

 

to the alien

doctors

 

that we know it’s wrong

to be sentimental.

 

It means you’re too easy

on yourself

 

or you’re an easy

mark, maybe,

 

a push-over,

 

and we’re brighter

than that.

 

Look there!

Rae Armantrout’s most recent books, Versed, Money Shot, Just Saying, Itself, Partly: New and Selected Poems, Entanglements, (a chapbook selection of poems in conversation with physics), and Wobble were published by Wesleyan University Press. Wobble, a finalist for the 2018 National Book Award, was selected by Library Journal as one of the best poetry books of 2018. Her book Conjure was published in 2020. Her newest book, Go Figure, is forthcoming in September 2024 – all from Wesleyan. In 2010 her book Versed won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and The National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2007 Armantrout received a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies and journals including Poetry,Conjunctions, Lana Turner, The Nation, The New Yorker, Bomb, Harper’s,The Paris Review, Postmodern American Poetry: a Norton Anthology, The Open Door: 100 Poems, 100 Years of Poetry Magazine, several volumes of The Best American Poetry, etc. Her Paris Review interview in “The Art of Poetry” series will appear in December, 2019.  She is recently retired from UC San Diego where she was professor of poetry and poetics. She now lives in the Seattle area.