I recently reviewed Pulitzer Prize winning poet Rae Armantrout’s latest book, Conjure, nominated for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, in Jacket2. It was delightful to re-read her so closely, as I have always been a great admirer of her poetry in general, and in particular, her use of physics in her poetry. She is fiercely inquisitive and philosophical.
Here’s an excerpt (really an excerpt—it’s a longish review!):
How can anyone engage with language in an essential way now? The numbness brought on by the language of politics and advertising — one that the Language writers of the 1970s and ’80s sought to quell — has been compounded by global capitalism, a ravaged planet, social media, and the rest of the internet’s anesthetizing algorithms. And yet it’s as if Rae Armantrout moves through the world in just this essential way, experiencing language in its most elemental, and often absurd, form: “Would you like the ability / to add a location / to your tweets?”[1] She seems to refuse the heuristics the rest of us adopt, those mental shortcuts that subtly grant permission to all manner of cyber-commerce we’re immersed in — or at least, she’s bearing witness: “My screen claims / I have ‘new memories.’”[2] But even as she engages with an evolving language increasingly polluted with techno- and social jargon and dystopian culture, even as her poems are populated with photobombing and zombies, Armantrout never shies from having something hefty to talk about. She has earned her reputation as an outstanding Language writer whose work attests to a singular mind taking on subjects of formidable substance.
Armantrout is a philosopher’s poet, and her new collection, Conjure, is a paragon of her bare language in search of bare truths (often by way of physics) dotted with her signature irreverence. […]
Physics is a discipline of subtle concepts rife with potential for distortion, but Armantrout never cheats. While we’re all bound to be unsettled by certain aspects of relativity and quantum mechanics, she does not settle for the lazy takeaways that a casual outsider might run with. She takes physics seriously as a method of inquiry, even as she maintains her skepticism and sense of humor. When she interrogates the language of physics, the outcome can be a playful seesaw of claim and doubt. Here is palpable frustration in part one of “Natural Histories”:
Since the irrational
“because I said so”
start,
they’d had their differences:
color that isn’t really
color, spin
that isn’t spin
because attitude’s
best
when it has no content.
Ask a physicist
what “charge” is;
he’ll say your question
makes no sense. (25)
The conceptually misleading labels we have for quarks may fall into some definite category for functional linguists, but they are vexing terms nevertheless: What point-like thing “spins”? On what axis? Certainly “color” is impossible in this realm. And for quarks we have the hybrid animal “color charge.” Even if one accepts that these properties have more to do with physicists’ calculations than any recognizable features, one feels there ought to be an answer — other than a number — for what these properties are. What makes one property different from the other, for instance? We want an answer in plain English, and it is simply not available. And, setting aside quarks’ “color charge,” this bothersome language problem pervades the entire invisible world of physics: even the familiar positive and negative electric charges, a physicist might tell you, are merely labels, and could have been called “silver” and “tiny” instead (and everything would have turned out the same way). But one with a probing mind is still apt to ask, “So they’re merely labels, but for what?” To refer to electric charge — positive and negative — is a convenient way to describe certain interactions, but it’s harder to define one except in terms of the other. As to the properties of quarks, they also ultimately amount to ways to describe interactions, and it would seem that at least a few equations and diagrams and years of formal study are required to answer these questions properly (that is, to a physicist’s satisfaction, but would that answer satisfy the poet?). There always seems to be some language evasion in physics, even when the language begins with precision (even Newton, who provided so much clarity defining mass mathematically, called it “a quantity of stuff”). In the end, Armantrout’s physicists offer us a “because I said so” ontology, one she might accept — at least provisionally — as she says a few lines up: “attitude’s / best / when it has no content.” Which feels right. And very Cheshire cat.
Read the full review online here!
