The Pulitzer Foundation never called. Instead, it was a PR woman from the university communications office who called Rae Armantrout to
congratulate her on "the award" and warn her that the media would want to talk to her soon. Armantrout couldn't imagine why. Why would the press care about her month-old win of the National Book Critics Circle Award?
It took a moment or two for Armantrout to sort out that what was at issue was the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her tenth book of poems, "Versed." Then, Armantrout, in her Normal Heights home on April 12, 2010, the day before her 63rd birthday, hollered for her long-time husband: "Chuck, Chuck — come here!" Then the media started calling.
A year later, requests for interviews have slowed down, but Armantrout is still going strong. Her 11th book, "Money Shot," came out in February.
What's changed since she won the Pulitzer? She travels even more than she was already doing—to readings, conferences, book festivals. In February, for example, she was on a plane practically every week of the month, crisscrossing the country. She is getting paid better for her appearances, she says. And always appended to her name now is The Prize: "Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Rae Armantrout." "Rae Armantrout, Pulitzer winner."
"Money Shot," Armantrout's 11th book of poems, was published by Wesleyan University Press in 2011.
What hasn't changed: She continues to teach at UC San Diego, in the literature department, where she started lecturing three decades ago. She is still married to Charles "Chuck" Korkegian, whom she met as an undergraduate at San Diego State. The rare cancer that dominates the second half of "Versed"—"How could it not?" she says—is still in remission. If all goes as well with the scan she has scheduled in May, she will be, in June of 2011, cancer-free for five years.
And, just like the unchanged contours of her biography, Armantrout's writing process remains the same, too.
Though she struggled with what she calls "winner's guilt" for a little bit after winning the Pulitzer, wondering if she deserved it and if the work was really any good, and also worrying if this was it, "the zenith, the acme," she "got over it" and got back to writing.
As she has been doing all along, Armantrout assembles her poems into collages that are at once spare and vivid. There are found words—snippets of overheard conversations and bits of things she reads, prosaic things (like a phone bill) or arcane (a volume on physics, say). There are glittering dribs of images. And there are her own, often wry, observations.
"I'm a big note taker. I always have a journal," Armantrout says, pulling one out from her purse and reading two of the latest entries: "He's your typical bowie knife expert," said by someone in a Louisville hotel, and notes from an article on memory in rats.
Armantrout guesstimates that about 10 percent of her journals' contents make it into poems. The notebooks themselves are finding their way to libraries at Stanford and UCSD, both of which hold collections of her papers. (Armantrout's very first known poem is at UCSD; written in kindergarten, it is about a little fish that swims around and around and then away.)
Rae Armantrout gives a talk and reads from her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection "Versed" at the 2010 National Book Festival.
A native Californian, Armantrout was born in Vallejo and first moved to San Diego when she was 4. She started college at SDSU then transferred to UC Berkeley, where she studied with poet Denise Levertov. She earned a master's at San Francisco State, and it was in the Bay Area, in the '70s, that she came of age as a poet. Armantrout is a founding figure in the first generation of Language Poets, an innovative group often credited with bringing the post-modern to poetry, but one that is still being defined as its central members continue to write.
"Money Shot" was already in press, at Wesleyan, when Armantrout won the Pulitzer. "Money Shot" examines the global financial crisis, the market manipulations that led to it, and other, as Armantrout calls them, "revelations," in her trademark style.
"With," by Rae Armantrout
She is currently at work on a twelfth collection, tentatively titled "Just Saying." The book in progress, Armantrout says, doesn't have as dramatic a theme as cancer or worldwide recession. Some of the poems concern speech acts. Some "riff off physics and science." Many start in a hotel—which she likens to "a waiting room in hell." Though she could give the book any of these slants if asked to write jacket copy, she says, she actually discovers the theme as she's going, and she's still going.
Armantrout is not sure when the book will be published. "I'm a little bit afraid they're already tired of me," she says.
Armantrout's fears are misplaced if the starred review of "Money Shot" in Publisher's Weekly is any guide. "Armantrout," writes PW, "is only getting better: these new poems are among her best, and among the most relevant poems now being written."
Then again, if she profoundly wanted to take a break, perhaps she could make a second career in the other way that she's really good with words: Scrabble? In her bag, next to her bound, paper journal, is a wireless e-reading device. In addition to containing the Lydia Davis translation of "Swann's Way" by Proust and Brian Greene's new book on physics, "The Hidden Reality: Parallel Universes and the Deep Laws of the Cosmos," it also has her latest Scrabble game. Her total so far: 318. The computer's is 100. "Hee hee hee," she says, "Score one for humans!"
