Page "Rae Armantrout" Paragraph 5

Critic Stephen Burt at the Boston Review commented: " 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 ".

As Burt noted, and as Armantrout herself acknowledges, her writing was significantly influenced by reading William Carlos Williams, whom she credits with developing her " sense of the line " and her understanding that " line breaks can create suspense and can destabilize meaning through delay.

" The basic unit of meaning in Armantrout's poetry is either the stanza or the section, and she writes both prose poetry and more traditional stanza-based poems.

In a conversation with poet, novelist, and critic Ben Lerner for BOMB Magazine, Armantrout said that she is more likely to write a prose poem " when hear the voice of a conventional narrator in head.