Rae Armantrout is the author of eleven books of poetry, including her most recent publication, Money Shot (2011), and her recent collection, Versed (2009), which won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Armantrout received an award in poetry from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts in 2007 and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008. She is Professor of Poetry and Poetics at the University of California, San Diego.

1

In my youth, I craved the small picture,

the autistic strung-out
hearts of ivy, star jasmine,

the “on and on”
without budging.

I liked Russian icons,

circles
within circles in

the virgin’s halo,
the way her cloak

matched the sky which
was not the sky at all.


2

Now I see
that the outsized “personalities”

of our day,
the Brad and Angies,

have the blurred, grainy texture
indicative of stretching.

We get a faint ping
back
when we focus on these objects.

3

“An electron
is an excitation

in an electron field,”

a permanent tizzy
in the presence of

what?

Like thought
it creates the ground
it covers,

like thought,
it can’t stop

Lisa Jarnot, a resident of Queens, New York, is the author of four collections of poetry including Night Scenes(2008). Her biography of the poet Robert Duncan will be published by University of California Press in 2012.

O rare Ben Johnson, do you
not know strife? Have you
not got topping on your cake, no
holes inside your shirt? Are you
asked to be yourself in dark
inside the rain? Is your door
the only door? Is your dark
the only ink to see? When
sweet love reads you, do you
read him back? Have you
fluffed yourself enough to
fly up to the moon? What
wants you, Ben Johnson of
the heart? What stone lies cold
on you?