Rae Armantrout’s collection Versed won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. She taught for more than twenty years at the University of California, San Diego.
I’m not lonely because I have secrets;
I’m lonely because words can’t bring the past into the present
(which amounts to the same thing).
*
Jack Rabbit and the Lonely Present
is the title of a book I almost wrote
*
I’m lonely because you’re
1. On ‘Buried Alive’, possessions can’t be lost
or found. They can’t be exchanged.
They’re negotiated
as one negotiates a landfill.
2. In the militarised evening, Boeing
touts its service to ‘our troops’. We’re shown
soldiers pinned down. One is strapped
to a pallet – ready for take-off?
3. In the currency market, I’m the
By 1979, when Rae Armantrout published her second book, The Invention of Hunger, with Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba Press, she was already what much of the literary world would soon learn to
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