A reading by renowned poet Rae Armantrout. The event will be followed by a book-signing.
The author of more than ten collections of poetry, Armantrout's most recent collections include Versed (2009), which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and a 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award, and was a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award; Itself (2015); Partly: New and Selected Poems (2016); Entanglements (2017); and Wobble (2018), a finalist for the National Book Award.
Armantrout's short-lined poems are often concerned with dismantling conventions of memory, pop culture, science, and mothering, and these unsparing interrogations are often streaked with wit. She has explained, “you can hold the various elements of my poems in your mind at one time, but those elements may be hissing and spitting at one another.” According to critic Stephanie Burt, “William Carlos Williams and Emily Dickinson together taught Armantrout how to dismantle and reassemble the forms of stanzaic lyric—how to turn it inside out and backwards, how to embody large questions and apprehensions in the conjunctions of individual words, how to generate productive clashes from arrangements of small groups of phrases. From these techniques, Armantrout has become one of the most recognizable, and one of the best, poets of her generation.”
Sponsored by Creative Writing Program, English Department, Clark Capstone Fund, Marjorie Cook Fund
