{"id":1626,"date":"2025-04-30T09:00:30","date_gmt":"2025-04-30T09:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/?p=1626"},"modified":"2025-04-30T09:07:40","modified_gmt":"2025-04-30T09:07:40","slug":"rae-armantrout-the-absence-of-certainty-a-conversation-with-kate-lilley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/2025\/04\/30\/rae-armantrout-the-absence-of-certainty-a-conversation-with-kate-lilley\/","title":{"rendered":"Rae Armantrout | ‘The absence of certainty’, a conversation with Kate Lilley"},"content":{"rendered":"

(Cordite Poetry Review<\/em>, 4th February 2025)<\/p>\n

Kate Lilley:<\/strong> … 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, \u2018thinky\u2019 character of your work, it\u2019s markedly \u2018intellectual.\u2019 You said emotion and affect tend to get left out. Why don\u2019t we start there with some of these poems?<\/p>\n

Rae Armantrout:<\/strong> Ok, I like that question. It\u2019s true. People often talk about the ambiguity of my work and how to make meaning out of it \u2013 how meaning might be problematised, which are all intellectual problems that are very interesting to me. I like your word \u2018proposition,\u2019 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\u2019s like they\u2019re chunky, unwieldy pieces of the world, and how do they line up with these propositions that I\u2019m trying to use to describe it?<\/p>\n

So, having said that I want to get around to emotion since I don\u2019t 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\u2019t identify, maybe because it\u2019s 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\u2019s where a poem starts \u2013 when I try to identify the source of a feeling.<\/p>\n

(Edited transcript of the conversation at Cordite Poetry Review<\/em><\/a>)<\/p>\n

(Complete interview online<\/a> on the Australian National University\u2019s Art and Social Sciences YouTube channel)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(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 …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[307,309,103,74,308,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1626","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-armantrout-rae","category-cordite-poetry-review","category-interviews","category-journals","category-lilley-kate","category-poetry","entry entry-center"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1626","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1626"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1626\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1628,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1626\/revisions\/1628"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1626"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1626"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/walleahpress.com.au\/currajah\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1626"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}