Quotes from Rae Armantrout

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.

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

I know you by your willingness.

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

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

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

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

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

Mozart creates a universe out of pleasantries.

But here I hold your dream in my poem.

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

this route is only one of several imaginary paths.

Now light sits in the chairs

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

Simple Complex systems can arise from simple rules. It's not that we want to survive, it's that we've been drugged and made to act as if we do while all the while the sea breaks and rolls, painlessly, under. If we're not copying it, we're lonely. Is this the knowledge that demands to be passed down? Time is made from swatches of heaven and hell. If we're not killing it, we're hungry.

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

The jacaranda, for instance, is beautiful but not serious.

To reinvent anomalous figments.

Proscenium of nearly identical mountain ridges, arched out and downward, one 'after' another, to the valley floor: curtains tied back, a gesture

Evening succeeds evening.

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

A receipt blown crazily across the parking lot, was, perhaps, a moth.

Perfect molecules of plastic sheet the seas.

The new pop song is about getting real: "You had a bad day." The camera don't lie. But they're lying to you about the camera.