Poet Fights Back by Putting an Edge on the Fuzzy Words That Bombard Us

In a society that thrives on fast food, 22-minute sitcoms and 10-second beer commercials, is there still a place for thoughtful, sensitive poetry? The kind of expression that makes people question life rather than giving them quick answers?

The answer is yes, says poet Rae Armantrout, who is troubled not as much by the question as by the fact that it has been asked at all.

“Poetry uses a lot of the same techniques that advertising does. It’s short, it tries to be catchy, it deals with connotation. But I think (advertising) is really opposite to poetry. The purpose in poetry is to try and make people more aware. And the purpose of advertising is to get people to do something without being quite aware why.

“So for me, writing is almost a way of fighting back. I get this feeling that I’m being barraged from all sides with information that may or may not really be information. Poetry, for me, is a way of processing all this language and image for myself, and kind of throwing it back at the world.”

The poetic ideas Armantrout has thrown back recently helped her capture a sought-after literary grant awarded by the California Arts Council. Only 47 writers--25 in poetry and 22 in fiction--received the $5,000 grants from a field of 653 applicants. This is the second year they have been awarded. (Harold Jaffe, a San Diego fiction writer whose work includes “Madonna and Other Spectacles,” published last summer, also earned a Cal Arts grant.)

Armantrout, 42, graduated from Hoover High School and now lives in Normal Heights with her husband and son. She began her writing career during the mid-1970s as a student at San Francisco State University, living in the somewhat seedy Castro District. Her husband, Charles Korkegian, managed a B. Dalton bookstore, and she worked at Macy’s.

“We were always running out of money before the next paycheck came,” Armantrout said.

She and about a dozen other poets she knew lived that traditionally meager existence quite happily for several years, working odd jobs to get by while holding readings, publishing their work and critiquing each other’s writing.

“But, when I got pregnant, the idea of staying in San Francisco and living on the edge of poverty somehow seemed frightening,” she said.

The couple returned to San Diego in 1979, where Armantrout continued to write and became a lecturer and teacher in the literature department at UC San Diego.

She has published three slim volumes of poetry: “Extremities” in 1978, “The Invention of Hunger” in 1979 and “Precedence,” her first hardback, in 1985. Her latest book, “Necromance,” will be released early next year by Los Angeles-based Sun and Moon Press.

Though critically acclaimed, her first two books of insightful, probing and sometimes angry poetry sold fewer than 500 copies each, and “Precedence” has not quite sold out its original press run of 1,000. Although poetry attracts an even smaller audience than fiction, Armantrout sticks steadfastly to the style.

“It’s closest to the original thought, and I want to be able to capture thought processes as they happen,” she said. “Poetry seems to be a natural form for that.”

Despite a tendency for Americans to be less receptive to the terse art form than people elsewhere, such as the Soviet Union and Latin America, Armantrout has never considered relinquishing poetry for fiction. The lack of serious poets in San Diego depresses her, she said, and she sometimes yearns for her early days in San Francisco.

“We get interesting, talented students (at UCSD), but they go away to New York or San Francisco. But I sort of wish they’d stay around here and get a scene going,” she said.

Armantrout, like many writers, educators and sociologists, blames the disinterest in poetry not only on the tendency of Americans to watch more television, but on a generalized passivity afoot in the nation. There was a time, she said, when almost everyone wrote in some form, whether memoirs or a journal, fiction or poetry.

“I think people now don’t have a very active relationship to language or information in general. It’s easy just to sit back and take it all in,” she said. “I’m upset about it. I think our culture’s pretty decadent, I guess.”

Armantrout has no plans to mount a poetry-appreciation campaign; instead, she will continue her individual battle, in the face of superficial commercials, dwindling sales of serious literature and her own struggle to find writing time in a day filled with children, cooking and laundry. (Some of her grant money will go to buy a new washing machine.)

“When I don’t have time to write, it’s all right for a week or two, but soon I start feeling like I’m an automaton, like I’m not really alive inside. At one point, it gave me the most pleasure in my life. Now I’d say it’s co-equal with my family.”

Armantrout’s works are available at The Book Works in Del Mar and University Bookstore at UCSD in La Jolla.

Oleander: coral from lipstick ads in the 50’s. Fruit of the tree of such knowledge. To “smack” (thin air) meaning kiss or hit. It appears in the guise of outworn usages because we are bad? Big masculine threat, insinuating and slangy. --”The Garden” by Rae Armantrout