(Rae Armantrout, Stephanie Burt, Amy Catanzano, Catherine Wagner, Monica Youn) Four author-critics approach Armantrout's work from a variety of angles, including her association with Language poetry, her exploration of science through verse, her treatment of pop culture and current events, and her merging of everyday experience with epistemological questions about perception.

Published Date: July 27, 2016

Transcription

Speaker 1 (00:00:03):

Welcome to the A W P podcast series. This event was recorded at the 2016 A W P conference in Los Angeles. The recording features Ray Armand Trout, Stephanie Bur, Amy t and Zano, Catherine Wagner and Monica Yung. You'll now hear Stephanie Elliot provide introductions.

Speaker 2 (00:00:33):

I want to thank everyone for being here today. I'm just going to introduce briefly our panelists and then I will let them get to it. We have Stephanie Burt, who's a professor of English at Harvard. She's the author of several books of poetry and literary criticism, including Belmont Parallel Play, close Calls With Nonsense, the Forms of Youth, all Seasons. Stephanie and Why I Am Not a Toddler. Amy Katano is the author of three books of poetry and CrossGen work, including Starlight and 2 million, a Neuroscientific Novella and Multiverses recipient of the Penn u s A literary award and poetry. An assistant professor at Wake Forest University, she directs the creative writing program. Catherine Wagner is the author of four collections of poetry most recently nervous device and her work has been anthologized in Norton anthology of Postmodern American Poetry and elsewhere. She directs the creative BA and MA programs at Miami University in Ohio in creative writing.

Speaker 2 (00:01:35):

Monica Yung is the author of Black Acre, which is forthcoming Ignatz, which was the finalist for the National Book Award in barter. She has been a Wallace Stegner fellow and a Witcher Binner fellow. She currently teaches poetry at Princeton University and at the M F A program for writers at Warren Wilson College. Ray Armand Trott's most recent book of poems is itself. An earlier book verse won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in the National Book Critic Circle Award In 2015, she received the Levinson Prize from Poetry Magazine, her poems and peer in numerous anthologies. She's a professor emeritus at U C C San Diego and I just wanted to add that I started working at Wesleyan at the end of 2013 and actually the first poetry book I worked on there was Ray's book up to Speed and that I really do recall honestly when I was so disappointed when Ray's book Next Life came out because when I read it I thought that she would win many awards.

Speaker 2 (00:02:29):

I truly was really sad that she didn't and then when her next book came out versed, of course she won those two awards and I was so happy and I have to say that it's truly a pleasure working with Ray. I really love her work. I think it's wonderful. I enjoy reading it and she's just a wonderful person too. I'm delighted that we can be here today to honor her and she's going to be signing copies of her book at our booth. Our booth is 1213 right after this. You can come and meet her and talk with her. Thank you.

Speaker 3 (00:03:03):

So even now that she has lots and lots of imitators, I think I can recognize ring Orman trout's poetry anywhere, and I think a lot of us share that feeling ought meaning should and ought. A cipher fetish objects now occur as previous centuries. You can stop dancing now, launchpad one's known and one knows better in the perfect sentence, the all new shortlist, old nagging sense of far enough, what are you afraid of? And those lines, which I selected very quickly, saw first book publication in 2011, 2004, 1995 and 1978, and I could say about any of them what Coleridge said about Wordsworth, which is they leave an affecting impression that I should have recognized anywhere. And had I met these lines running wild in the desert of Arabia, I should have instantly screamed out Wordsworth or in this case Armand trout. Not just the lion's brevity but their deliberateness.

Speaker 3 (00:04:07):

The way they ask us to recognize how all of our speech is made of previous speech, the way that they put that speech under a kind of magnifying glass, which sometimes burns the way that the lines almost shrug and say, here is the language we're given. How can we reject it? But also how can we accept it? These effects which are not only ideas but musical effects and effects of tone tempted to say a voice, although as some of us know voice is a problematic term, these effects are hers and they've remained hers since the late seventies, and that's all true, not just of fairly abstract passages that draw attention to names for ideas and figures of speech, like the ones that just read you. I could say almost the same thing about lines that unlike the ones I just quoted, envision something concrete passages that attend to our experience of sight, of seeing things in the world.

Speaker 3 (00:05:01):

And if I had time, I would read you some of those and typically an armature visual passage will show you something that could be ridiculous or beautiful or both depending on the angle from which you come at it and sees the same thing through multiple frames, each of which modernizes the rest and between the way that her poems treat herd language and the way that her poems treat the scene, the visible, the sensory world, it's easy to think of her work as all of a piece and if you've tried to teach that work or write about it for people who aren't used to it, you've probably found yourself treating it as all of a piece and that's fine. We need to be able to recognize what a poet who's this original sounds like. But then once we've done that, and this is the takeaway for this whole talk and there are eight minutes left, we really need to start reading the books one by one.

Speaker 3 (00:06:00):

I'm here today not to say that she's great in general because you're in this room. I think you probably agree or at least that generally she rewards sustained attention. I'm here instead to say, when you reread the books, they turn out to differ from one another a lot. They have different emphases, different preoccupations, different ways to use her signature moves. Extremities for instance now looks like a book about mini, that's her 1978 book. It's an early book, a set of experiments that is 78, right? Yeah. As to how small poems or parts of poems can get after William Carlos Williams after Ara Saroyan after Robert Granier and still feel not sort of conceptual art, but like poems with semantic and syntactic parts inside them. That book looks that way even on the most crowded pages and certainly on the sparses, which are the ones that now get anthologized to see how the sentence flies, how small a bit of description or a bit of narrative can get and still feel like description is also to show in a way that's unlike what Royan or Granier or the seventies creely had been showing how much of our understanding of description or narration involves us filling in the blanks and how much of that fill in work involves what Roland Barth's called mythologies or received ideas or cliches.

Speaker 3 (00:07:23):

So that to quote that book, it is as one knew and once she had done that kind of demonstration, she could give other books, other unifying subjects, precedents from 1985 rereading. It seems really to me like a book about moving back to San Diego, which she had recently done. I forget the year

Speaker 4 (00:07:45):

79.

Speaker 3 (00:07:46):

79, so it took a while to percolate maybe, but precedence really feels to me like a book about that southern California space. So these are the hills of home. It begins to see them is to see double hear, bad puns delivered with a wink. That's about how when we come home we see an old place through new eyes and remember how we used to see it. That return brings an untoward familiarity because the poet has started her own family. That's a book dedicated to Aaron and because if you had the birth family that Armand Trout would later describe in her memoir true or anti memoir, you would not want to move toward it towards an important word in that poem so much as perhaps away from it. But she came home anyway to a sunnier place where no one can doubt sunlight's beneficence and an arm of daisies naturally juts into the lawn.

Speaker 3 (00:08:39):

Fannie Howe and Lydia Davis who would know better than I would've both argued at length that San Diego matters to Armand Trout's work, and my point is that precedence is the book where that mattering is central in necro or necro from 1991. On the other hand, the through line is feminism. This is a book that starts and ends with the gendered stereotypes that Dorothy Stein called the Mermaid and the Mita stereotypes that come to us sometimes from our parents' habits of speech, sometimes from radio, billboards and television. In the title poem, the Siren always sings like this and the Suen come to see their grudge as pose modeling. And the women or girls in these poems and necro come to feel they have no choice but to act in bad faith. They're sort of captured by a compulsory insincere gender performance, and you can see this touched on throughout her work, but in necro it's central and that's one reason why it is drier and maybe closer to cynicism than the language of some of her later books. You can't defeat mortality or memory or fame, which her later books address. You can't get rid of them, but you can maybe get rid of undermine so thoroughly that it crumbles the beauty myth, the frame that requires all women to play the actress, the nun, the kid or else the gatekeeper to apologize for any kind of assertiveness. So that conversation to quote another poem from Necro breaks down into equal blocks known as Ky.

Speaker 3 (00:10:13):

Couple more minutes I think I ought to be using to show you how her later books differ from the earlier ones and from one another. In the pretext from 2001, you still find an interest in gender. Gender is the birthmark, which has bothered me. The book opens, but the tones are very different because what holds together that book is not feminism so much as mortality, frail bodies, especially the bodies of parents and the way we see them as they move toward an exit from this life. I hate body language, Armand Trout says in writing from that book, yet she finds there a way to write about bodies ill bodies and uncomfortable vulnerable bodies that sounds as flustered or as frustrated or as dejected as those of us contemplating frail bodies can feel. If I were dying in a hospital bed, she asks would I get pencil and paper to jot down passing thoughts?

Speaker 3 (00:11:02):

Not likely. I myself was always a forwarding address and that bit of prose poetry shows you how that book connects to the kind of dorid sense that is there throughout her work that you're never completely present to yourself and to the sense that's specific to that book, to the pretext that neither this world nor the next world any imaginable next world can feel like home and it's about also the home that is not provided by the mother figures in her work by the mother. In that book, we begin, she writes with some surrogate mothering beginning with the surrogate mother, if much of the pretext addresses the body and the mother's body, the book Up to Speed addresses the poet's own life and her sense of her career, her life is her own in that book. It doesn't belong to parents or children and she has to decide if any of us ever really decide what to do with the rest of it.

Speaker 3 (00:11:57):

I'll read you a little bit of a poem from the beginning of that book of Up to Speed, the plot Winnows the Stinks wants me to guess, does a road run its whole length at once? Is it such agendas which survive as souls? And these are questions about how we look back on our own lives and on our poetic careers once we have published enough and been writing enough and been read by others enough to think that we have careers and careers also as teachers as well. Wait, why is that funny? Is it funny? Is it funny? Okay, career is a weird word because it implies both sort of exchange value, professional reward and things like the Brazilian career, the sense of what do you want to do with your life as a poet apart from whether people are reading you or paying you for your poetry and that doubling is central to up to speed.

Speaker 3 (00:12:52):

I wanted to talk about a couple more books, but I also want not to overstay my welcome just saying her, not her most recent book, but the one before that is a Yates book. It brings her weirdly close to William Butler Yates who doesn't sound like Armand trout but whose late topics turn out to be hers In that book, not capitalism or feminism so much, but art and artifice the life course and the decades after youth. Few people like to be told or reminded they're not 30 or not 20, but in just saying as in a whole bunch of late Yates, that kind of reminder turns into a subject that holds together the book as Armand Trout keeps saying and feeling what a lot of us who aren't 20 feel that she has been there before, that she has seen too much to be taken in, that her current life is a third or fourth act.

Speaker 3 (00:13:38):

One early poem begins, hush, do you want me to start over elsewhere? She wonders if we are to ride professionally as the days nod and wink and in that book she's asking if she's become the establishment at this point in her life, is she the enemy? If you're young and want to be avant-garde? Of course not. But that kind of looking back, that kind of questioning is something that she could not have done in the pretext or in Neri and it links at least in my mind to the Yates of the circus Animal's, desertion or the Yates of what then for whom bad things have already happened along with good things decades and events in the lives of her friends who are artists have passed. My dead friends don't visit me says one stands it from that book. They say, I didn't know them. They say I didn't know them.

Speaker 3 (00:14:22):

Does anybody really know anyone else? Is anybody one person or one body? These are central questions to all of Armand trout, but just saying recognizes not only how hard it is to answer them, but how those questions and those answers change when you've been doing this for a while. And it's also, and I'm going to stop here, almost calm just saying is not quite resigned but less angry than earlier books about the flawed language with which we have to live. If the right metaphor for her tone in the eighties was corrosion, sometimes now the right metaphor which just saying advances is that small fist pump now used to indicate ironies. Uselessness.

Speaker 5 (00:15:10):

Thank you. Wow, that was amazing. Thank you. I'm really happy to be here talking and celebrating Ray Armand Trout's work. I'm going to be speaking about Ray Armand trout's poetry in relation to physics and how she works with concepts and physics and how she's been doing this for many years. She has over 50 poems that reference some aspect of physics starting with the poem engines, her 1983 and 1992 collaboration with Ron Sillman, which is included in veil her selected poems from 2001, and there she references a massless particle known as a neutrino, but she says this particle is not a neutrino, the semblance of existence. She says lurks in the verb. She's jointly exploring particle physics and also what is meant by existence, which I want to talk about today a little bit about how this is a gesture that emerges over and over in her work, this focus on concepts and physics along with questions about existence in reality throughout literary history, there's been a tradition of poets engaging with science and I see this aspect of ray's work as somewhat under acknowledged, but also as an extension of this longer tradition and also part of an interdisciplinary movement in contemporary poetry today where poets are incorporating science into their work as philosophical investigations the way Ray does, but also as acts of science itself that there are so many poets working with science and poetry as linked modes of inquiry is a significant response that writers are having today to different orders of knowledge and reality outside of the mainstream.

Speaker 5 (00:16:57):

And Ray's poems, physics, collides with everyday objects, media and information culture and inquiries into ontological experience and perception. One aspect of her work that aligns with the language writers of which she's associated is that the materiality of language and how language mediates thinking is at the foreground of her poetry. She's not using language but working with it, not assuming universality or seeing the poem as a vehicle for transcendence, morality or clarity, but instead working where transcendence, morality and clarity fail. Her vision is peripheral and fractured. Speaking to the emergent and approximate ecologies supported by physics such as quantum mechanics, her foregrounding of the materiality of language in her poetry aligns her work with the investigations of the material universe that happens in disciplines like physics. Ray's latest book itself starts with the poem ality and within the second stanza she's referencing what could be interpreted as string theory or that elementary particle known as the neutrino.

Speaker 5 (00:18:12):

She says, if I didn't need to do anything, would I oscillate in two or three dimensions? String theorists propose that our universe is one of many and that matter is made of particles bound at the subatomic level by oscillating strings, vibrating membranes of energy. The casual swift movement from a simple yet provocative mussing to the question of would the speaker as a collection of strings or as a neutrino exist in these dimensions? It complicates the subject position of the poem making the speaker the string or neutrino and a few stand later she writes, A massless particle passes through the void with no resistance and here she seems to be referencing a weightless particle like the neutrino that doesn't have mass and which passes through all matter and some of them even contain their particles that contain their own antiparticle, so they're very mysterious and she says, ask what it means to pass through the void and ask how it differs from not passing.

Speaker 5 (00:19:19):

So what is matter in the context of space and time is a question that this line evokes. And by writing a poem about this question, she's asking similar questions that physicists ask Ality. The poem's title refers to the issue of asymmetry and physics. So scientists are interested in the asymmetry of matter and antimatter in the universe. There's a lot more matter than antimatter in the known universe and neutrinos that may contain their own antiparticles are being studied by physicists to learn more about this. So when the speaker of her poem asks what it means to pass through the void and not the speaker is asking these questions as well as asking how meaning itself is determined in not just poetry but in physics as well. The first two stanzas of her poem dress up in her book just saying Explore what existence means by condensing and arranging Stephen goer's the Little Book of strength theory referencing a dressed electron that emits virtual particles which spontaneously jump in and out of existence and are real or not depending on how reality is defined.

Speaker 5 (00:20:28):

She ends the poem with the image of a toddler waiting for the speaker and her companions to get the joke about being here, being there. Ray brings together the virtual particle and the toddler in the same poem, but not to create an easy correspondence between them. Though we might see an image of the dressing up which plays off of the dressed electron that emits virtual particles, but as a way to see what happens when the images are joined. We make our own associations. She's not setting out to prove a hypothesis, but treating experimentation, curiosity and inquiry through language as an end in and of itself. The last couplet in the poem about being here, being there evokes the virtual particle being here, being there. It evokes Gertrude Steins. There is no there there and also what I would call the elsewhere and everywhere, but not somewhere that is a nowhere like quanta.

Speaker 5 (00:21:24):

The subatomic level one dresses up whether the subject position is the electron or the adults viewing the toddler all existing in costume, which is reality where at times we might play as the toddler might play dress up by using the imagination to pretend to be something somewhere else while at the same time here everywhere and nowhere. The poem suggests it takes imagination to contend with physics and it is an investigation into its own freedom to be here and there. In other poems of rays we see properties and physics humorously addressed. So for example, in her poem accounts in just saying she presents the speed of light and relativity being interrupted with a drinking cup that has a slogan that reads thinking of you with an exclamation point. The cup brings this absurd and unpretentious exuberance to her exploration of the speed of light. This collaging of physics with an ordinary object with a marketing slogan is a signature gesture of ray's and we see a similar move in her poem material which combines physics with material from an infomercial.

Speaker 5 (00:22:32):

There the poem opens with dry infomercial speak. Oh, you're wearing the gold one. That's my favorite to be honest. The gun metal is all gone ostensibly the gun metal color is sold out right from the whatever's being sold on the infomercial. But next she moves into a discussion about how we exist as infant asal points material. She told me that she got from a book by the physicist Brian Cox and her poem accounts by the way as dedicated to Brian Keating, a physicist with whom she co-taught a course on poetry and physics at the University of California and San Diego. In her poem around in her book Versed, she contends with her mortality in relation to time and what she calls its penile loops which have meaning. This meaning she says italicizing the this poem narrates a scene where she and a family member have found a spot where her ashes would be scattered upon her death.

Speaker 5 (00:23:31):

They are being shown this spot she says by a sort of realtor highlighting the eerie similarities of how shopping for a place of final rest and death is like shopping for a house where one lives. The scene is narrated with an emotional detachment or maybe an acceptance of the reality, but it's tethered by this earlier passage about time and its pendulum loops. And then a statement about time in quotations indicating another slogan or sign the future is all around us outside of the quotation marks. She says it's a place talking about the future and then in a new stanza, any place we don't exist. The future is any place we don't exist in this moment. She makes time, a space, a period without us, which speaks to the place where her ashes can be scattered. The stanza break in between any place and we don't exist is a break in time and space too, just enough for the reader to feel our own mortality and absence in that period of space between stanzas.

Speaker 5 (00:24:38):

In her poem passage she writes, I existed finally as the idea of temporal extension inverting the ordinary notion that humans and nature are three dimensional and moving through a linear dimension of time, which is the fourth dimension in physics with a different notion that the speaker exists as time or as the fourth dimension extended instead into three dimensions of space Existence in this context is what she calls later in a later poem, a double meaning or later in that poem, a double meaning or a super position, the latter term referring to a property of subatomic particles in the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics where particles exist in all possible points of space in time in superposition before the moment of observation or measurement when their wave functions collapse and then come out of superposition. The word is superposition is followed by the image of a creature appearing larger and more ferocious than it is.

Speaker 5 (00:25:38):

So the image serves to bring even further nuance to the concept of super position, what is real and what is a ruse, a nuance that happens between the possible and the actual between the passage of life and death. In her poem Spin in Money Shot, she references the quantum mechanical property of spin and despite the name of the property spin, subatomic particles don't rotate but possess this property of spin, which is an intrinsic property of particles like mass. So physicists describes spin as angular momentum and her poem talks about particles having spin but no dimension or volume in depth, and yet these particles are said to exist. The poem asks, how is this possible except this question is not asked directly, but instead through offering information about the particles and then moving on to two sections, one describing the speech of a political candidate and the other a simple statement where she says, light strikes our eyes and we say, look there with an exclamation point and the word there italicized.

Speaker 5 (00:26:43):

It's like her earlier examination of the here and there that we see in her poem dress up, whereas the dressed electron emitting virtual particles points to being here and being there at the same time in her poem Spin. To get there, we have to speak and say, look, after the light has struck, our eyes seen, there is a mechanical process mediated by light, the eyes, and most importantly language. It's the Speech act or poem that directs us to encounter what is ordinarily taken for granted. However, in the context of physics and everyday experience, that generic language in Ray's poems, what we encounter is not only the idea of existence, the generic language of a politician or light striking the eyes. What we encounter are these ideas together on the page in language. It's there where we begin to see that the politicians' empty phrasing is the dimensionalist point that theoretically spins the way news spins.

Speaker 5 (00:27:39):

It has no depth because we are embedded in our own quantum mechanical properties. We can never see anything from the outside. We can only see there when the light allows us to see there. And this is where I think a meta critical reading of ray's poetry is necessary. The poem is itself an occasion where observation is directed except it doesn't point us to the static reality narrowed by a perspective that is presumed to be happening only here and only there. Instead, her poetry suggests that the poem is also something like a neutrino or a dimensionalist point dressed with virtual particles here and there at the same time operating outside of reality that is unmediated by poetic language with its own strange properties In her newer poem. Accordingly, she addresses how spacetime operates in quantum mechanics in plank time, which is one way how time is measured.

Speaker 5 (00:28:36):

In quantum theory she says things get fuzzy less thingy. She's comparing the fuzziness of quantum mechanics to the precision of the scientific method, which is based on observing nature to describe natural laws, which she evokes with the phrase concrete as a slot machine. In quantum mechanics, you can't describe the position and momentum of particles with certainty. This is the uncertainty principle. When she writes to be precise, you need to stop a moment which turns out to be impractical. She seems to be saying that in quantum mechanics, a moment cannot be stopped and observed, and she's referencing relativity when she says, and besides speed is of the essence in this poem as in so many others, she's using her poetic form to its maximum potential. So the short lines, the section breaks, it all serves to physically compress these cosmological ideas and a minimalist or subatomic body creating a kind of shorthand for the poem, making the poem itself a kind of vehicle of time travel a tesser act like Dr. Who's TTUs time machine, which is bigger on the inside than the outside. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2 (00:29:57):

Hello everybody. Kathy Wagner here. I'm so delighted to be here on this stage with favorite living poet Ray Armand trout. She's just amazing and also to be with all of you. So my paper is called US Customs and Border Reflections understood broadly as boundaries, barriers, walls, transition zones, points at which one thing starts and another stops. Borders are everywhere. In Ray Arm Trott's work, I'm going to discuss the figure and the fact of the border in Ray arm trots poems in relation to the politically geographical and historical border between the US and Mexico on the way. I'll talk briefly about the activist poet scholar, Gloria Alua, who is a useful figure for comparison because she's a very different writer, but she was about Ray's age and she died in 2004. She's five years older than Ray I think, and she grew up in the borderlands too, although way at the other end, almost 2000 miles away in Texas, I won't have time to go over all the instances where border like structures come up and raise poems or all the ways she makes strategic uses of the borders and passages available in poetic form, juxtapositioning line breaks, et cetera.

Speaker 2 (00:31:08):

But I will throw a few examples up on the screen while I'm talking. Please forgive how quickly I flip through these. I'm happy to share if anybody wants to see. So political geographical border references come up once in a while. Much more often. Other sorts of border like structures are imaged various passageways walls and barriers, protected zones such as Eden and transition points, neuronal passageways or the event horizon at the edge of a black hole. Ray also frequently uses border like language to describe her own and others poems as when she described in an early essay, a poem by Sharon Olds as a fenced yard and her own poem view as an instance of poetics, of collisions and overlaps contested spaces.

Speaker 2 (00:32:04):

Ray also uses formal strategies that could be described as border like Her poems are highly segmented. Here's an example not to look at closely, but just it's a short one that shows a form that she frequently does use her poems across. Her books are highly segmented among much formal variety. She relies on short lines and short stances quite frequently on sections divided by numbers or asterisk or similar symbols. A strategy of juxtaposition that leaves gaps a reader's brain must fill. Those segments are firmly ordered. The relations between segments is not fixed or monodirectional. The implicit request is to look back, look again. We see differently from the other side of the gap. I'm speculating that the many images of borders and transition zones in raise work have to do with the presence of the Mexico US border. So close by and there you can see where Ray lives. There's a little tiny arrow, not the address.

Speaker 2 (00:33:03):

Ray writes frequently about our local environment, suburban scenes, what's under Ray's nose. What composes her poems isn't usually the political border. By contrast in Gloria Sal's writing, for example, the violence, the border enacts on her community's bodies and minds looms large, but to think of ray's writing as borderland writing draws attention to her frequent use of images of porous boundaries and charged transition zones. Just as we might see the walls around San Diego's many gated communities as reproductions in miniature of the efforts to promote security at the national border, we can look at border like structures represented in Ray's poems and investigate how they manifest and figuratively interrogate a settler colonialist perspective. Okay, so now first I'll run through some information about where Ray grew up and still lives and what's happened to the border in her lifetime. She grew up in the fifties and sixties in a place called Allied Gardens in northern San Diego, 22 miles from the border apart from some years in the Bay area, Ray has always lived near the border in San Diego in 1970 when she graduated from college, white non-Hispanics like her made up 78% of California's population.

Speaker 2 (00:34:14):

Chicanos and Mexicans would likely not have been a strong presence in her daily life. In her memoir, true Ray mentions awareness of her white identity, but in the context of a visit to the segregated US south, as of 2014, white non-Hispanics had dropped to only 38% of California's total population. While the Hispanic population white and non-white accounted for 39%. However, San Diego and San Diego County remained predominantly non-Hispanic white in high school, Ray fantasized about crossing the border with her friend Linda. Linda and I had heard that Old Mexico was a lot like the old West. We decided to run away and live there as bandits. We would take buses to Neals in the white mountains of Arizona. There we would buy horses and disappear over the border. Ray is poking gentle fun at her girl self. She calls the idea an insane mission. She and her friend desire a place apart where they can change their identities, become outlaws.

Speaker 2 (00:35:13):

Their dissatisfaction with home makes them desire a non place where they can be other than they are. And that place is Mexico. The activist, poet, scholar, Gloria Alua also from the Borderlands and born five years before Ray to a Mestizo family had a different perspective on the border, which she calls a 1,950 mile long open wound dividing a pueblo. A culture running down the length of my body, splits me, splits me. This is my home, this thin edge of barbed wire. The first section of Anzaldua's book, borderlands la Frontera begins at the San Diego border at border Field Park at the border between San Diego and Tijuana. I walk through the hole in the fence to the other side under my fingers. I feel the gritty wire rusted by 139 years of the salty breath of the sea for Alua who was from a mestiza background and who was also lesbian.

Speaker 2 (00:36:07):

So between cultures in that way as well, the border is both physical and effective. A zone of indeterminate dangers created by the people who stole the lands from its residents. After the Spanish American war, the whites who continue to decide who counts as illegitimate, whose bodies can be treated violently. Borders are set up to define the places that are safe and unsafe to distinguish us from them. A borderland is a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary gringo in the US southwest. Consider the inhabitants of the borderlands transgressors aliens. Whether they possess documents or not, trespassers will be raped, maimed, strangled, gassed shot. The only legitimate inhabitants are those in power. The whites and those who align themselves with whites and Bence and unrest reside there and death is no stranger. The border has become more of a barrier since San Al DOA died.

Speaker 2 (00:36:58):

Construction on the US Mexico barrier, a 700 mile secure fence with additional security apparatuses such as cameras and monitoring stations With authorized in 2006, it was intended to deter illegal immigration and transportation of illegal drugs. Congress allotted 1.2 million billion to build it. The barriers led to a steep increase in the number of people trying to cross in difficult terrain. As of 2007, some 50,000 people had died crossing the border, most notably in the Sonoran Desert where a crossing point leads across the Babo Kiva Mountain in Arizona. Oddly enough, this crossing is not far from where Ray and her friend Linda hoped to cross into Mexico. The borders and border like imagery and ray's, poems obviously do not address the violence and oppression the barrier causes and Al's works describes not directly, but her poems do. Flip between anecdotes and perspectives that juxtapose describe and critique power relations.

Speaker 2 (00:37:58):

Let's look at three poems by Ray that were written about 20 years apart from one another. The first poem in Ray's very first book published in 1978 in extremities published 13 years after Ray planned to light out for the Mexican desert. Here's a similarly attractive and dangerous desert, a place of pilgrimage and purposeful deprivation. One goes to the desert at Lent to be like Christ during his 40 days in the desert. This no place a landscape of zeros is protected by swords as is the garden of Eden. Yet the word swords contains words and the lines across beings vanish flare. The boundary between us and the desert could be lines of poetry. The desert here is a desirable place, dangerous as it is associated with the power of language. To reveal the edge of the knowable by naming it,

Speaker 2 (00:38:55):

Visibility from 1995 directly mentions the US Mexico border. But each section brings up barriers of some sort. In the first section, the speaker recognizes that it's attractive to be deceived that the windows she's sitting near can't be seen through. She likes feeling inaccessible and protected though she's on some level aware that she's not in the third section in which the speaker observes migrants trying to cross the freeway. And I've got a picture here of a road sign that would've been around when Ray wrote that poem, a San Diego Freeway Road sign. The speaker notes that aliens is a word connected with this scene. If she, the speaker can avoid these words, what remains should be her experience. Maybe the speaker is expressing a desire to keep the alienness of the migrants out of her own view, to preserve a nationalistic purity. Or maybe the speaker would like to avoid the power that the power of the word aliens has to make her see the migrants in a bigoted way, wanting to avoid what we might now call racial scripts. With the ambiguity of the passage, Ray draws attention to the often deceptive power of words to direct experience. The last poem I will discuss is normal, which is a new poem. It's absolutely a tor force of a new poem from partly selected a new poems, which I thought maybe would be out for a WP, but apparently isn't going to be out. It's a fantastic book so you must get it when it comes out. This poem, the border and normal is in its rhetorical structure.

Speaker 6 (00:40:37):

We move from, you see how it says intelligence is distributed, read is merchant property and then there's a mirror. Goals are an emergent property, others are distributed. That middle part. We move through this transformative transition point at the midpoint of the poem that when we finish leads us to start again from the top with a new perspective. So the beginning of the poem

Speaker 2 (00:41:01):

Expresses a point of view reminiscent of Charles Murray's the bell curve where IQ is unequally distributed and ergo some can be greedier than others. Survival instincts that do violence to others are simply normal. The first half of the poem summarizes the individualistically oriented assumptions sometimes used to justify free market capitalism of the type that constructed the Quila Doras on the border. The middle sentences are a valve or an asymmetrical chiasmus, A rhetorical transition point leading us to a mirror image of the first two lines where we discover the harmful effects of the perspective of the first half of the poem. Others are distributed, the grammar passive establishes the others as passive recipients of distributed forces that promote the difference between powerful subjects and others who get moved around whether they like it or not. As we move down what appear to be a logical set of statements, we cross a boundary between assumptions and their results and find ourselves in a land of harm resembling our own. Where some eyes have it and others don't raise boundaries are points at which we catch language in the act of constructing our reality.

Speaker 2 (00:42:21):

Among all the playful voices adapted and raised poems, all the speculative perspectives, I haven't come across attempts at speculatively inhabiting the experience of the humans who move through the borderland. Close by though migrants are certainly mentioned here and there. If there is sympathy for migrant experience here, it resists any attempt to puppet it. In speculative voicings is the difference between Ray and Anzaldua's experiences of the border unbridgeable in two and two poem in itself, Ray says that if there and here can be made to coincide what else might not be possible If limits, as Charles Olsson said, are what we are all inside of Ray's poems mess with those boundaries. Her moving articulated fierce honesty about the perspectives available to her is evident in the titles. She's given her two volumes of selected poems through the vigilantly observed and articulated obscurity of the veil. We can see partly thank you.

Speaker 7 (00:43:35):

So I did not do a formal paper much like my dog who used to leave me dead chipmunks on the doorstep, not because I like chipmunks, but because chipmunks were what he could do. I can do PowerPoints and so that's what I did. Okay, so Ray Armand Trout of course has been one of my greatest lifetime influences, a mentor, a friend. I'm so proud to be here with her and I often teach Ray's work and I think that's kind of what this talk is directed to, even to beginning undergraduates. I mean she's often the first so-called difficult poet that they've encountered and in class after class they go absolutely nuts for her work, but they want to be able to articulate why they like it, their students and what they like so much about it, what draws them. I can talk about her use of found language of phrases that whether or not set off by air quotes present themselves as hackneyed, makeshift, secondhand spent.

Speaker 7 (00:44:31):

But in this day and age honestly, who doesn't make use of found language? Similarly, I could tell my students about her syntactical slippages the disembodied and unstable and shifting speakers of her palms, stripped of pronouns and identifying features. Her sudden swerve to focus as if through a macro lens on a particular detail on a jointed grass blade, on the ragged skirt of dust surrounding a decorative gourd. But none of these aspects of ray's work singly or in conjunction seem adequately to describe what it is that makes an Armand trout poem recognizable as an arma trout poem, that particular sensibility. And in working with these students, I found an unlikely resource to be useful in explaining at least some aspects of what is going on in some of Ray's poems, the 2009 film of course Avatar. And thus I have titled this highly informal presentation, Ray Armand Trout Avatar or what a terrible movie Can Tell us about a great Poet's work.

Speaker 7 (00:45:36):

So a brief plot recap for those of you and wise enough not to have seen this movie, the film is set in a post-apocalyptic future in which earth has exhausted its own resources and must exploit those of other worlds. One of those worlds is called Pandora, which has a precious mineral called unobtainium. Pandora is inhabited by an indigenous race of tall blue skinned humanoids called the Navi, all of whom have pledged to support Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primary. The atmosphere of Pandora is poisonous to humans. The hero of the film is a wounded now paraplegic US Marine named Jake Sully. And just as an aside, surely they must have known that Jake Sully means dirty toilet, right? I mean did that occur to anyone? Anyhow, Jake is recruited by the military for a top secret mission on Pandora. Upon his arrival, he learns that the military has created a synthetic navi body for him called an avatar.

Speaker 7 (00:46:34):

This avatar has been genetically matched to his own body. They intend to transfer his consciousness to this Navi avatar. This will allow him to survive in Pandora's atmosphere and to interact with the Navi population. In the meantime, his body will be placed in cryogenic suspension. He agrees to the deal is put to sleep and wakes up to his new existence as an avatar, a consciousness trapped for better or for worse in an alien body. He finds himself to be the possessor, the inhabitant of a body that feels unnatural, ungainly, unfamiliar sensations, movements, coordination between mind and body all feel brand new to him as experienced for the first time in a way that is potentially terrifying as well as exhilarating. He's in danger of sensory overload of being a danger to himself and others. He learns that his new body is immensely powerful in ways that he must learn to control.

Speaker 7 (00:47:39):

He uses his avatar to explore the world of Pandora, to experience alien pleasures and new modes of existence. The thick plots, as they say, various heavy handed post-colonial hijinks ensue. And at times we are recalled to an awareness of the abandoned actual body frozen in its pod. Often the abandoned body occupies the traditional position of the damsel in distress, presented as helpless a bone of contention in need of rescue. Although the abandoned body is eventually revealed to be superfluous, dispensable obsolete, it still serves as an emotional anchor for the film, a link to what is perceived to be authentic nonsynthetic natural, the concept of home. So why am I bringing this up? After all, I'm not claiming that Ray was influenced by this movie, if she ever even saw it. You did see it. And the only use of the word avatar that I found in Ray's work is in the poems operations in this memorable phrase, Hey, my avatar is not working, which was written before the movie avatar ever came out.

Speaker 7 (00:48:49):

Although video game avatars I think were commonplace at the time. But instead I use the term avatar to refer to the way the speaker in Ray's poems situates herself with respect to the world of language. Because of course it is a post-structuralist commonplace that the self is constituted as language that ourselves themselves are semi linguistic constructs. But ray's work really brings that to life. It enacts this strangeness, this alienness of the linguistically constituted self. Bob Perelman has suggested something like this when he writes of Ray's poem, disown becoming a social being does not entail possession of one's perceptions of the world. Amnesia, repression alienation are constant results. It's as if every time you read one of Ray's poem find you wake up to find yourself trapped in a new body, an alien body, an artificial body made up of bits and pieces of other people's language, a body that is ungainly, uncomfortable, unfamiliar, powerful, and in some ways marvelous.

Speaker 7 (00:49:55):

A body's whose foreignness, who's inauthenticity. You never become accustomed to a body that might look something like this. This is the cover of itself. And when I first saw this image, of course I wanted to know more about it. So I turned to the book jacket description. This photograph of a spongy decorator crab, Marco Sama, tri Trium shows how this particular crab used other living creatures to decorate itself. In this case by including some spectacular zoo. Zoe spa decorator attach a variety of living and non-living material to their carpus exoskeleton shell as camouflage. I tried Googling this text and I didn't get any other hits than Ray's book, which led me to suspect. Where did this come from? Did you write it? Did Stephanie write? Where did this text come from? Ray? I didn't write it. Okay. In any case, this image looks a lot like the physical analog to the linguistic construct of an avatar that I've been describing, a Frankenstein like asage of other people's detritus.

Speaker 7 (00:51:02):

So what does this look like in some actual poems? In the interest of time, I'm not going to be able to read them aloud, but let's start with an early example from extremities. This is the poem xenophobia. Some things to note here. Note the way the forced word, the word that is forced here chimera is not set off syntactically from the rest of the section. So it becomes unclear how much of the rest of the language of the poem, the description of the houses that ensues is itself forced a prescription recited by rote in images that suggest the deteriorating body language that's the doctor's language as much as it is the speaker. And in part five of this poem, the way the phrase is not my expression, not my net of veins are placed as syntactical parallel so that the language and the body are conflated and equated.

Speaker 7 (00:51:55):

Let's look in another poem. Sorry, I'm really ripping through these because of the time limits. So this is the poem, attention from Necro and Ron Sillman, who's one of the privileged few with whom Ray apparently shares. Her early drafts has observed that her process of revision is often one in which pronouns disappear, a process of depersonalization, and thus the reader's thrust directly into the situation without a stable speaker or other proxy. Here the reader awakens to discover herself in a linguistic state of forced infantilization. I'm not a baby, even her protests that she is not a baby or a couched in baby language. But even as this plight is enacted, the reader is also and simultaneously introduced to an awakening pleasure. In this new world of language, she discovers the you in the heart of molecule and ridicule as if discovering the core of a new flower, she fashions a rhyme out of the thing, moth wing as if awakening to a sense of her own potential power as a user of language.

Speaker 7 (00:53:09):

Let's move on to the palm statement from a pretext. Here we get a sense of the discomfort, the ineptitude of this linguistically constituted self. When I say dissociation, I may have said real time action. The linguistic the speaker finds herself inhabiting is ungainly with an apparently malfunctioning interface between intention and utterance. The avatar is also troublingly unstable, morphing from moment to moment in response to other people's names. From potential demographic mother, 31 year old to mother as obstetric patient prima grata to nicknamed actual mother of a little golden book reading, child pokey puppy. Where does the morphing stop? It seems that anything can be a name as long as it follows certain conventions of capitalization. The distractible sparrow, the smallest district, the strictest definition, the chameleonlike qualities of the avatar have caused the speaker to disappear into her own surroundings. This new world of language.

Speaker 7 (00:54:18):

Here's a section of the title, Palm of up to Speed. And here to contrast the slipperiness of the signifier, we get an image of the literal, the concrete, literally concrete bricks. And this image of the actual is almost nostalgic, almost an emotional anchor. The speaker searches her linguistic arsenal what she has available, and she throws various terms at it instantly, forever, only to have them bounce off this wall. And an impenetrable wall surrounds the word, the unapproachable word takes on a quasi religious significance. The air quotes around the phrase with God might as well be the curtains of a sort of tabernacle, a sort of veil. So from the title poem to Moneyshot, why don't you just say what you mean? Why don't I, again, the ineptness inadequacy of this avatar is vividly enacted the frustration of inhabiting other people's language. Even the speaker's pushback against the absurd question.

Speaker 7 (00:55:24):

Why don't you say what you mean? Is couched in a repetition of the same found language, this is the boundaries of her universe. There's something of the futility of using the master's tools to dismantle the master's house here. I mean, how can the speaker adequately convey the inadequacy of language if she has only inadequate language to work with in the first place? As part of the language lesson, I have holes cut in my forehead at times, especially in her more recent work, we see avatar like figures more directly represented. And for me that sort of coincides with an increasing comfort with using a first person speaker that we see. And I think some of her more recent books, the persistent downplaying of the first person is becoming less frequent. It used to be you would read through Ray Armand Trout's book and it would be like first person safari. Ooh, I saw an I and now it's much less like that.

Speaker 7 (00:56:24):

Okay, and I'm just going to end with this poem expression from itself. And I may be biased, but I feel like the qualities that I've been talking about here are so apparent that there's nothing to be added to the simple pleasure of reading this poem, which I will indulge myself in. Now expression, give me your spurt of verbs, your welter of pronouns desiring to be spread, bulge eyed, clea