Rae Armantrout Quotes

#1. Poetry wants to make things mean more than they mean, says someone, as if we knew how much things meant, and in what unit of measure.

Rae Armantrout

#2. As a child,
I was abandoned
in a story
made of trees.
Here's the small
gasp
of this clearing
come "upon" "again

Rae Armantrout

#3. Today could be described as a retired man humming tunelessly to himself.

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#4. This route is only one of several imaginary paths.

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#5. A sense of mission lost
in ink's
jagged outcrops.
I was trying to tell myself
what I must have known
before
in a form
I wouldn't recognize at first.

Rae Armantrout

#6. Now light sits in the chairs

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#7. The future is all around here.' It's a place, anyplace where we don't exist.

Rae Armantrout

#8. So much happiness is caged in language, ready to burst out anytime and fade

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#9. But here I hold your dream in my poem.

Rae Armantrout

#10. Thus drivers inching southward will see the phalanx of birds heading west as one spontaneous gesture.

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#11. When I dreamed about flying,
it was as a skill
I needed to regain.

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#12. Mozart creates a universe out of pleasantries.

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#13. We are all full of discourses that we only half understand and half mean.

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#14. Curled up in bed,
I'm young
in the old way.

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#15. Perfect molecules of plastic sheet the seas.

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#16. I know you by your willingness.

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#17. The ghosts swarm. They speak as one person. Each has left something undone.

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#18. I'm composed largely of what the streets and rooms look like, of how to arrive 'just' here.

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#19. The fear
that all this
will end.
The fear
that it won't.

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#20. Metaphor is ritual sacrifice. It kills the look-alike. No, metaphor is homeopathy.

Rae Armantrout

#21. Carried by light, images remain while sensation is so evanescent as to be always beyond belief.

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#22. We sleep together in the dark but confuse light with love.

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#23. The feeling of emptiness is a pre-existing condition. Jargon forces intimacy.

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#24. The crowd is made of little gods, and there is still no heaven.

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#25. Lily Brown writes with and against things in poems that are coiled up tight as springs (or snakes). A believer in the power of the line, she writes, 'I think the plastics/and sink them' then 'Where is the sand/man hiding the dirt.' These terse, biting poems will make you look around and wonder.

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#26. Metaphor forms a crust beneath which the crevasse of each experience.

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#27. Clarity need not be equivalent to / readability. How readable is the world?

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#28. In the updraft, the particulate glitz is beside itself.

Rae Armantrout