Rae Armantrout Reads Dorothea Lasky
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You're listening to the New Yorker Poetry Podcast. I'm Kevin Young, poetry editor of the New Yorker magazine.

On this program, we invite a poet to select a poem from the New Yorker Archive to read and discuss. Then they read a poem of their own that's been published in the magazine. Today, my guest is Rae Armantrout, whose many books include Go Figure, Finalists, Conjure, and Wobble. Her collection, Versed, won a National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Welcome, Rae. Thanks so much for being here. Hi, Kevin. Nice to be here.

So the first poem you've chosen to read is Mother by Dorothy Olasky. What drew you to this particular poem while you were perusing the archives? It seems so simple in a way, but it's not. It's got very simple language, and yet it's a kind of riddle. So I wanted to come back to it. Well, let's listen to the poem. This is Ray Armentrout reading Mother by Dorothy Olasky. Mother

mother i went in the rose garden in the middle of the night to find the things i lost there mother i searched for you for seven nights and could not find you they left your perfume everywhere a kind of toying aspect and scratched your picture with their talons i replaced it despite their anger and still got up in the morning to feed the babies their first meal

"'Mother, I wore a lilac dress and stepped through the thistle. "'The alligators had already overtaken the endless landscape. "'Your body was somewhere there, and it was my job to bury it. "'In my head your voice rang out with the strangest aroma. "'The gods had left you in the rose garden. "'Mother, I went in before dawn to find you. "'I didn't know they left so many noxious animals there to hurt me.'

Terrible fear upon fear. Mother, I was motherless, so I became myself finally. I wandered in the endless garden to find something I had lost. When I finally gave up, mother, the roses, they overtook me. I filled with vines and lead. I waited two hundred years. Mother, I waited there forever, searching and searching, mother, until they let you in again.

That was Mother by Dorothea Lasky, which was published in the October 21st, 2024 issue of The New Yorker. I was struck hearing it from you, so well read, about the world in which the poem takes place. Is it the world of dream for you? Is it the world of myth? Is it the world of grief? How did you approach it?

All three. That's exactly what I was going to say. It has one foot in the daily life of a woman who's got to get up and feed her babies, although, you know, how many babies are there? That was something that stopped me for a minute. And one foot in fairy tale or myth. It's a kind of...

classic quest, I guess. The hero goes to find or to rescue someone, often a maiden or, you know, maybe his father. But in this case, a woman is going supposedly to rescue her mother. But it gets strange from there, right? It's strange because it's a dream or strange for some other reason.

It's got the sort of almost generic standard language of myth and fairy tale. You know, she looks for seven knights. Mother, I searched for you for seven knights. And it's got the dangerous animals and the roses are scratching her with their talons, though, which makes them sound like raptors.

So she's encountering these dangers as she walks through the rose garden. All of the images are, I don't know, they're almost standard. And yet the poem is so unstandard. I think that's what really drew me to it is, you know, if someone told me, okay, here's a poem about mothers and roses, I would think, hmm, Hallmark card. But it's really anything but that.

One thing that puzzles me in an interesting way, and you can give me your take on it, of course, is that everything is so plural. I mean, except for perhaps the speaker herself, but everything else, the babies and the they, I mean, the they is very mysterious, this they who somehow put the animals in the garden. And at one point it says gods, but...

But that's only touched on once. "Gods," too, of course, is plural. But there's a more mysterious "they" that are just dropping things here. And the animals, of course, are plural. And also, the language is often quite repetitious, searching and searching. And there's the place where it says,

Terrible fear upon fear. Mother, I was motherless. So I guess that's part of the way that she creates the sense of being lost is that there's all of this repetition and this doubling. So it's like a maze. Oh, I love that. It's also kind of like an incantation in that way. It's repeating everything.

You know, another way to hear it is as a kind of wish. You know, Mother, I went to, you know, and we haven't spoken of this address to the mother. Mother, I searched for you for seven nights and could not find you. This urgent kind of letter, missive plea, even prayer to the mother who is kind of Mother Earth, Mother God, all these kind of things, the beloved more generally. And I think there's something really powerful about that.

How do you think about this sort of waiting that happens at the end? Yeah, I love the end. It is when she's given up that there, which is a sort of sad and frightening moment. But after she gives up, mother, they let you in again. I mean, so it's a mystery. I don't know whether actually the mother, as you were saying, the mother God or the mother earth is coming back now that she is herself part of the garden.

I also thought, although this is probably an eccentric reading, I thought of Eve and the Garden of Eden and being thrown out and then maybe being able to come back in again. Well, there's a kind of metaphor of that paradise lost, of course, in the whole poem. And I think this letting, you know, the they, it's somewhat the gods, it's somewhat, you know,

death and life, all the big things are there without having to name them in that same simple way. I think it wouldn't be, obviously, as powerful as, I was dreaming the other night. You know, or if it somehow didn't have this mystery, which I think is a great part of its power. And I think a lot about mystery, and I don't know how you approach it in poems, but I think it's one of those things that, for me, I

I almost crave more and more of lately. I think that so much of our language is so assured, maybe wrongly even, but here we're able to

have your perfume everywhere, a kind of toying aspect, you know. There's a kind of playfulness, which, because it isn't all one tone, I feel like the tone shifts, and in that way it's both mysterious and kind of pleasurable, even as it's describing pain. Yeah, toying.

as in being toyed with, but also, you know, as in toys, which are something you can play with and something that you might have done with your mother when you were young. One thing, again, that interests me about it is how

It goes against so many of the rules, if you will, that students are taught when they learn or when they supposedly learn how to write poetry. I mean, a teacher would perhaps say, well, what kind of animal?

Well, we do hear it's an alligator, but an alligator seems kind of off, right? And then so many noxious animals. Well, noxious is not something an animal is. Animals are venomous or they're dangerous. They're not noxious. So this is not a criticism. It's just that there's – it's a little askew from the narrative that it's telling. I mean –

All the time there's this estrangement or defamiliarization. You think that you're going to get maybe a version of a quest narrative except with a female hero, heroine, and you do. But I think maybe she's using these slightly off words like noxious or toying instead of maybe cloying or whatever. Words that you don't expect at all and that don't quite fit her.

I think she's using that so that we don't forget that we're in a poem, that we don't start thinking that we are actually in some kind of standard hero quest. We're in it, but we're not in it, if you know what I mean. It's kind of like a metanarrative or paranarrative. Right. I think of it as that lyric urgency that isn't afraid of...

The unexpected of the kind of slippages that I think are part of language, but which is to say part of experience. Mother, I wore a lilac dress and stepped through the thistle. The alligators had already overtaken the endless landscape. Your body was somewhere there. It was my job to bury it.

That feels so urgent to me. And if they were, you know, I don't know, something more expected, I don't think the predatory slash urgent slash that weird duty that one finds is...

in grief. You know, when my father died, I wrote about this, you know, I had this compelling need to get all of his stuff from the dry cleaner, you know? Wow. And it was a kind of way to try to make him whole, I think. And there's something here about that that isn't about biography, but is about the personal lyric self that

In some ways we share and in some ways we don't. That's what I love about this poem is that it's so particular in its grief, let's say, but also so I feel it. Yeah, yeah. It's the rhythm, partly, I think. The rhythm is very emphatic. Yes. I could hear that when you were reading it, and I just naturally did it when I was reading it, perhaps because of the repetitions. Right.

Do you hear it kind of breathless? It has no punctuation. Yeah, I noticed that. Yeah. And how do you hear that? Is that something you hear a particular way or is it different in every poem? It helps you read through the line instead of pausing at the end of a line. I mean, I tend to give a little pause at the end of a line when I read. But since there's no punctuation, this just gets rolling and it rolls in a good way.

Yeah. You know, you were talking about students earlier. I find that sometimes people end up using what they want is a kind of rhythm like this, which I think is so natural, but also, as you said, unexpected. And sometimes they end up in a kind of

or a not useful oddness, maybe. I don't know. They could learn a lot from looking at a poem like this that gives us that kind of breath, but also breathlessness. It gives us a sense of time, but also kind of timelessness for me. And some of that's the imagery you mentioned, a rose is a rose is a rose, but then also it has alligators and noxious animals, as you said. And I think that moment toward the end

Mother, the roses they overtook me, I filled with vines and lead. I waited 200 years. It says something about the sorrows that can come for all of us that I think is really powerful. I really admire how it manages to evoke and not describe. It's in the garden, and we're in the garden with the speaker.

Yeah, that's a really good way to put it. I was trying to get to that, I think, when I was talking about the simplicity of the language, that it really doesn't describe. To a sort of surprising degree, it doesn't describe. It just kind of puts you right there, and it has this forward pressure. Yeah. Well, one of the things I wonder about the poem is this address question. Do you think of it as a love poem?

Yeah. I mean, it sounds like she does miss her mother, but it's also interesting that she makes it very clear that she too is a mother. So I get this feeling of generations of mothers, maybe all the way back to Eve or Lucy, in some kind of endless search for the mother.

I think that's one thing that really stuck with me is that she creates a kind of sense of timelessness, you know, of time, of huge time. She searched forever, right? She says 200 years, so that's this attempt to be specific. But then, mother, I waited there forever, searching and searching.

I think it's interesting that she's waiting and searching at the same time. Sure. So perhaps unlike the standard male hero who would be, you know, hitting those rose bushes with a sword and knocking them out of the way, she is overtaken and waiting. But in the end, perhaps her waiting is what allows mother to come back in again to be, you know, permitted back.

And I don't know whether that is her mother, her memory of her mother, or whether now she is the mother because she finds herself, right? She said that she found herself. And then mother, they let you in again. So, you know, maybe she's the mother now. I love that idea. That's well said. And she not only finds herself, she became myself finally. Oh, yeah. And there's a kind of sense of this search for the mother again.

And it isn't about the finding. It's about the search that lets one become oneself. And I love that idea, and you put it so well. Thank you. More from my conversation with Ray Armantrout after the break.

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Now, in our October 24th, 2022 issue, The New Yorker published your poem, Finally, which we'll hear you read momentarily. Did you want to tell us anything about the poem first before you read it? Well, the reason that I chose it, and I want to say, first of all, that I chose these poems very quickly because

I was asked to choose two poems, and I just looked at the first page of poems, and I went, oh, Mother, definitely. And finally, those two are going to go together. And it was kind of instinctive. But then when I really sat down and thought about it, I realized that finally and Mother have things in common. They both are about love.

an intimate, maybe family relationship. And they both are narratives that are sort of aligned with a kind of standard genre, but then a half note off from it too. And finally, it suggests, it makes gestures as if it were perhaps a kind of castaway shipwreck

story, in the beginning at least, or these people are stranded perhaps in a flood plain and there's this debris around of various objects or they're disaster survivors.

So it seems like it might be that kind of narrative, but I'm always kind of backing away from that at the same time by putting it all in the negative, not afterglow, not the last word, not really a floodplain, and not quite water. So it's all put kind of under erasure or in the negative while at the same time it's telling a story. So it's trying to develop the story while...

saying not quite this. And there's something about that that reminded me of the way Dorothy Alasky in Mother is giving us a kind of quest narrative, but

It's not the usual one. She's a half, like I said, a sort of quarter turn off from the standard fairy tale quest narrative. And this is at least a quarter turn off from the narrative and the metaphor, if you will, that it's presenting. Here's Ray Armentrout reading her poem, Finally. Finally.

Not afterglow, not the last word. Still, they were able to more or less enjoy the feeling of being washed up together on what was not really a floodplain from which the not-quite-water had receded, leaving a large number of more or less interesting artifacts which, they had learned, appeared to them differently.

so that what she saw as a large wooden radio he saw as a fireplace mantle and what she saw as self-sufficiency he saw as strangulation in past times they had fought bitterly about what things were what they should or should not be now they tried to guess what the other would call any object they spotted

They had come to find failure hilarious and even faked it on some occasions. That was Ray Amontrout reading her poem, Finally. Great to hear it in your voice, and I'm not sure I would have taken it the way you said with a sort of...

Shipwreck. It felt, for me at least, a little like a marriage. Maybe it's the same thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I'm saying. The shipwreck frame is just a frame. I mean, really. Sure, of course. Really, it is about a marriage. But it starts out with this metaphor.

Right. Yes. And then how much is it going to commit to the metaphor? And I start, of course, being me to be a little uncomfortable with the narrative and with the metaphor and try to have my cake and eat it to have my metaphor and step away from it at the same time. But the stepping away lessons, I'd say, in the second chapter.

half of the poem. And then it's more clear that this really is about a couple who have a long relationship and

And see things very differently and like many couples. They've worked through this. I mean, when I say it this way, it sounds completely ordinary, right? They've worked through this to the point where they even find their differences funny. I guess what I've done in the poem is exaggerated to such a degree that it does sound funny. Yeah.

Well, I think the title helps us. We start with finally, which is both a kind of giving up almost, like finally, like someone says something like that, almost sarcastically. But then at the same time, it's also at the end. And it starts with the end, not afterglow, not the last word. These are...

final things or after things that I think you managed to evoke right away, which I think is really great. It manages to talk about the pleasures, I would say, of a long relationship and the ways that

It isn't about afterglow or winning, the last words say. But it's still they were able to more or less enjoy the feeling of being washed up together. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and I guess I had written that pretty directly about a relationship until I got to washed up.

Well, and I love that phrase, washed up, because it means something different in a different context. Exactly. You know, here it is, washed up. It's the end. We're all washed up. And then yet, it's also this idea, as you know, of being stranded. Yeah. And then once I had washed, that was a suggestion of water. And from there, I went to floodplain and I went to not quite water.

And yet, even though it's only not quite water, it still does what water does. It recedes and it leaves objects behind after it's receded. So it sounds a little bit like perhaps a tidal wave or something like that. When I started writing the poem, I had not intended that at all. I mean, I just started thinking...

About my marriage, actually, of course, and writing these words. And then when I got to WASHED, I just, you know, went into this metaphor. But at the same time that I go into the metaphor, I'm kind of hinting all the time that the metaphor is to be taken seriously and yet at the same time not taken too seriously. Sure.

At the same time, it has a sense of humor that I think a lot of your work has. And I wonder how aware you are of that and how do you approach humor? Is it something that comes up? Is it fight it as you might? You can't help but find failure hilarious and even fake it on some occasions. How do you approach it? I mean, of course, that ending is somewhat exaggerated, but I think that's what makes it funny. And of course, the fact that faking it

within a marriage usually has to do with sex, right? So when I say they had come to find failure hilarious and even faked it on some occasions, I think probably when you think of a couple

And perhaps faking it. One thing you might think is faking orgasm. One thing you might think is faking that they are happy or that they're having a good time. Sure. And those are the kinds of things that you normally would not find hilarious.

But this couple has been together so long, it's kind of like Dorothy Alasky's 200 years. They've been together so long that even these things that are usually very serious things could be seen with humor. Yeah, I was going to ask you, is this a love poem?

Well, yeah. Of course. Maybe the first answer. I guess what makes it to me is that the best love poems, like the best love songs, they have like a little sadness in them or they admit fault or, you know, they're not like all roses to use a metaphor. Right. Well, no long relationship is all roses. Absolutely.

And that's what I meant was that I might as well, I guess, in the poem exaggerate their differences. I mean, it's, you know, one thing to think a fireplace mantle is a radio. That's pretty strange. But thinking that self-sufficiency is strangulation, well, that's even weirder. So their differences are blown up in the poem. And then even those differences, they have come to accept and laugh about.

Well, one question I had is about poetry itself. Is this describing poetry as well? Is it a kind of ars poetica, which is to say a poem about poetry? Partly. I didn't.

set out to write an Ars Poetica, but then, you know, you often do things that you didn't set out to do. I mean... Thank goodness, and also how strange, you know, but it's true. With all its teasing about metaphor and whether the speaker is going to commit to the metaphor or not keeps the device foregrounded, keeps the fact that this is a poem and the writer is speaking to you, keeps that in mind and that

I could decide to say anything next. The poem could go anywhere and sometimes does, i.e. goes to strangulation or, you know, and then passed it into laughing. And so it keeps the fact that you're listening to someone making things up front and center.

Well, and also, to my mind, has this idea of guessing what the other would call any object they spotted. Oh, yeah. I see what you mean. And making a kind of attempt to recognize a name, which is at the heart of poetry. And, you know, we were talking about Eve earlier. And in a way, this couple is a kind of primal, paradisiacal couple who are, you know, washed up together in a kind of Eden of love.

and a modern Eden that is a little rough around the edges. And I think there's something beautiful about that that I also would say might speak to poetry and certainly your poetry and its ability to find these things either hilarious or meaningful, but also to let things be what they were. Yeah. I think that instead of a paradise at the beginning, a sort of Adam and Eve couple, maybe...

Maybe this is after something. We don't really know after what. I mean, after a long and perhaps difficult relationship, after, if you follow the metaphor, after some kind of disaster, whatever.

After they've collected a whole lot of objects that are now strewn around on the ground, apparently. Right. So they are still together, but they are, well, it says not afterglow, not the last words. So we're in that, I guess, realm where you might want to say last words. They're an end-of-the-line sort of couple. They're the other end of history, maybe, not at the beginning in the first Paradise. Right.

So well said and so well done in this poem. Well, Ray, thank you so much for talking with me today. It was fun. It's been a real pleasure. Finally, by Ray Armantrout, as well as Dorothea Lasky's mother, can be found on newyorker.com. Dorothea Lasky most recently published the poetry collection, The Shining. Ray Armantrout's latest book is Go Figure.

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