Poet Named National Book Award Finalist

Inga Kiderra | October 19, 2009

Rae Armantrout

UC San Diego poet Rae Armantrout’s most recent book, “Versed,” has been selected as a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award.

A professor of writing and literature at UCSD for more than two decades, Armantrout is one of five finalists in the poetry category and one of 20 overall. The winner in each category – fiction, nonfiction, poetry and young people’s literature – will be announced at an invitation-only benefit gala in New York City on Nov. 18.

Each winner will receive $10,000 and a bronze statue; each finalist will receive a bronze medal and $1,000. But the importance of the award goes far beyond dollars. Reading the recipient lists over the 60-year history of the National Book Award is like reading a who’s who of American letters: Faulkner, Bellow, Updike, to name just a handful from the fiction category.

“I am thrilled and honored to be nominated for such a prestigious award, ” Armantrout said.

Armantrout heads up the department of literature’s writing section and is the author of 10 books of poetry, including “Versed,” “Next Life,” “Up to Speed,” and “Veil: New and Selected Poems.”

Guggenheim Fellow in Poetry (2008), Armantrout is a native Californian whose poems are masterful contradictions; according to Robert Creeley, her poems have "a quiet and enabling signature." He adds, "I don’t think there’s another poet writing who is so consummate in authority and yet so generous to her readers and company alike."

Armantrout came up as a poet in the Bay Area, educated at UC Berkeley (AB, 1970), where she studied with Denise Levertov, and San Francisco State (MA, 1975). Subsequently, she was at the center of the first generation of Language Poets, the group in the U.S. most often credited with introducing poetry to post-modernity.

Since then, Armantrout has forged a growing international reputation. Countless of her poems have been anthologized, including recently in: “Best American Poetry” of 2002, 2005, 2007, and 2009, “American Hybrid,” “Poems of the Women's Movement,” “The Oxford Book of American Poetry” and “Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology.” Her work also makes regular appearances in newspapers and magazines, including, again recently, in The New Yorker, Poetry, Conjunctions, Partisan Review and the LA Times.

In 2000, a collection of critical writings on Armantrout’s work, “A Wild Salience,” was published by Burning Deck.

At UCSD, in addition to teaching poetry and poetics to graduate and undergraduate students, she has directed the New Writing Series of readings and lectures since 1989.

According to Wesleyan University Press, the publisher of “Versed” (and many of her other books of poems), the book is organized like many collections of her poetry, as though it were a work in itself:  “‘Versed’ brings two of these sequences together, offering readers an expanded view of the arc of her writing. The poems in the first section, Versed, play with vice and versa, the perversity of human consciousness. They flirt with error and delusion, skating on a thin ice that inevitably cracks. In the second section, Dark Matter, the invisible and unknowable are confronted directly as Armantrout’s experience with cancer marks these poems with a new austerity shot through with her signature wit and stark unsentimental thinking.”