Through Armantroutâs Looking Glass: The Poem as Wonderland
“I learned that poems may be deliberate and arbitrary at the same time.”âan essay by Julie Marie Wade
“I learned that poems may be deliberate and arbitrary at the same time.”âan essay by Julie Marie Wade
We scroll pages
as if scanning thickets
By Jack Chelgren | Special Projects Intern and Contributing Writer As a word is mostly connotation,  matter is mostly aura?  Halo? (The same loneliness that separates me  from what I call âthe world.â) â Rae Armantrout, âA Resemblanceâ I. Itâs afternoon not long ago. Iâm listening to music in my apartment, and âThe Last Time I Saw Richard,â the closer from Joni Mitchellâs Blue, comes on. The last time I saw Richard was Detroit in â68 And he told me, âAll romantics meet the same fate someday: Cynical and drunk and boring someone in some dark cafĂ©.â
By Scott Condon | Contributing Writer The title of Rae Armantroutâs poem âThrownâ immediately brings to mind philosopher Martin Heideggerâs notion that human life is thrown into the world. This concept plays a key role in his book Being and Time, and Iâll return to Heidegger a little later. But Iâd like to begin by looking at the poem through the lens of James Longenbachâs essay âPoetry Thinking,â focusing in particular on a couple of passages that address the way Shakespeareâs characters speak their thoughts.