(Cordite Poetry Review, 4th February 2025)
Kate Lilley: … One of the things you said when we were having a bit of back and forth about how we might do this was when I asked you what often gets left out, because everybody writes about (for good reason) the markedly intelligent, propositional, ‘thinky’ character of your work, it’s markedly ‘intellectual.’ You said emotion and affect tend to get left out. Why don’t we start there with some of these poems?
Rae Armantrout: Ok, I like that question. It’s true. People often talk about the ambiguity of my work and how to make meaning out of it – how meaning might be problematised, which are all intellectual problems that are very interesting to me. I like your word ‘proposition,’ Kate. One thing I like to do is to throw out a proposition that may or may not be true, it could conceivably be true, and then pose examples of what it might mean and look like for it to actually be true. Often, the examples are problematic, somehow. It’s like they’re chunky, unwieldy pieces of the world, and how do they line up with these propositions that I’m trying to use to describe it?
So, having said that I want to get around to emotion since I don’t talk about it much. I may not be good at talking about it, but I can tell you that every poem of mine starts with a feeling. And usually with a feeling I can’t identify, maybe because it’s complicated, kind of a compound feeling of ironic yet wistful or a sad yet angry combination of feelings. But also, sometimes, I need help understanding the source of the feeling, and that’s where a poem starts – when I try to identify the source of a feeling.
(Edited transcript of the conversation at Cordite Poetry Review)
(Complete interview online on the Australian National University’s Art and Social Sciences YouTube channel)