Join us on The New Yorker‘s Sound Cloud to enjoy a reading and interview with Rae Armantrout, conducted by Paul Muldoon. Armantrout recalls and reads a Susan Wheeler poem, from the The New Yorker archives. Then she reads a poem of her own, before discussing her work with Muldoon.

Wesleyan University Press will publish Armantrout’s next book, Itself, in February 2015. Today’s poem is from Armantrout’s 2004 collection, Up to Speed.

“Fieldwork”

One’s a connoisseur of vacancies,

Loud silences
surrounding human artifacts:

Stucco hulls
of forgotten origin

that squat
over the sleepers

in rows
on raised platforms.

She calls her finds
“encapsulations.”

*

One is ebullient,

shaving seconds,
navigating among refills.

She’s concerned with the rhythm
of her own sequence of events,

if such they can be called,

though these may be indistinguishable
from those in the lives of other people,

though the continuity which interests her
breaks up
the middle distance.

*

She finds the fly-leaves of her new notebook
have been pre-printed
in old-fashioned script–

phrases broken to suggest
mid-race

as a site of faux urgency:

“this work since it’s commenced”

“cannot nor willnot stay”

 

———-
Rae Armantrout is a professor of writing in the Literature Department at the University of California at San Diego, and the author of many books of poetry, including Money Shot, Versed, Next Life, and Veil: New and Selected Poems. She is the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, a National Book Critics Circle Award, and many other awards.