Currency

I stare at the edge

until the wordtulip

comes upwhere I thought it might.But the lag-timeis a problem.

The swollen, yellowhead of Tweety-Bird

now offeredat the border

as balloonor ceramic,

as babyplus crucifixion,

as distendedincredulity

held towards the cars,as silence2

(From Up to Speed, Wesleyan University Press, 2004, page 4).

2 In the review of Up to Speed in the July 2004 issue of The Women’s Review of Books, Adrian Oktenberg wrote about this poem: “… it helps to know that Armantrout lives in San Diego. The poem can be read as a sort of abstract landscape of a scene at the border: the lines of cars waiting to cross at sunrise; hawkers selling novelties and images of the Christ-child and crucifixion; and an attitude or mood. It could be that. Or something else.” Armantrout admits that Oktenberg’s reading is partly right. “So why didn’t I make that clearer or easier by saying something like, “As I was waiting to cross the border, I saw many vendors selling Tweetly-Bird balloons,” etc.? Then Oktenberg wouldn’t have had to second-guess herself. The answer is that I want my poems to move at the speed of thought, to have the immediacy and urgency of real-time thought. (…) And what about the reader? I’d like her to participate in/at the inception of experience, if possible–not just hear an after fact report. As an experience coalesces, we aren’t telling ourselves where we are.” (“An E-Mail Interview with Rae Armantrout by Eric Elshtain & Matthias Regan”, in Rae Armantrout: Collected Prose. San Diego: Singing Horse Press 2007, pages 86-102).