A poetic analysis forr Greg:

Here's the first section of a poem by Rae Armantrout:

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."

I object to the notion that you can't judge this by ordinary means, that you need some secret code to be able to talk about the extent to which this poem is effective or not. I am attracted to the central metaphor of archeological fieldwork as a way of understanding our relation to the past. To be a "connoisseur of vacancies" (nice phrase by the way) is to be attracted to those gaps or silences surrounding artifacts of human cultures. The visual evocation of the "stucco hulls" that stand above the archeologists sleeping in the camp falls a little flat for me. There seems to be a lack of intensity in some of these short free verse lines: "in rows / on raised platforms." It's not horrible, but the short lines seem to call for more intensity. At the end of this section we find out that a particular female archeologist calls her discoveries "encapsulations." Armantrout invites us to unpack this word--maybe the suggestion of a "time capsule"? I'm not sure this word is quite as interesting as Armantrout finds it, but my brain is mildly stimulated by the exercise.

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 of the lives of other people,

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

The part of this second section that is most comprehensible is also rather flat and prosaic. I like the ideas, which hold my interest, but am a little disappointed by the flatness of the expression and the inability to sustain a convincing rhythm. The more elliptical/enigmatic details aren't quite suggestive enough for me.

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

phrases broken to suggest
mid-race

as a site of faux-urgency:

"this work since it's commenced"

"cannot or willnot stay"

I like the way the three sections of the poem give us three perspectives on a single problem, and I like individual moments of all three sections. Armantrout, as usual, offers strong aphorisms and observations, but the poem for me remains a little thin in between the stronger lines. Armantrout is a poet I like somewhat; she is neither my favorite nor a writer I view with extreme skepticism. I have moods in which I find her briliant, and other times when I am mildly disappointed. Needless to say, I mean no disrespect to her work, which is obviously more substantial than anything I have been able to achieve in this art form.