“My Problem” by Rae Armantrout

Posted on January 27, 2007
Filed Under Poetry, Reading |

I’ve been meaning to post this poem for a long time. As my students might say, I can identify with it.

My Problem

It is my problem
to squeeze
the present from the past
by demanding particulars.

When the dog is used
to represent the inner
man, I need to ask,
“What kind of dog is it?”

If a parasitic
metaphor grows all
throughout – good!
Why stop with a barnacle?

A honeysuckle,
thrown like an arm
around a chain-link fence,
would be far more

articulated,
more precisely repetitive,
giving me the feeling
that I can go on like this

while the woman
at the next table says,
“You smell pretty,”
and sends her small daughter’s

laugh, a spluttery orgasm,
into my ear –
though this may not have been
what you intended.

It may not be a problem
when I notice
the way the person shifts.

I’m not posting this because I want to write a commentary. I’d just note the way phrases & lines coincide, giving the poem a very matter of fact feel. If it were my poem, my obsession with symmetry would have forced me to make the last stanza four lines long, but that’s my problem. Given Armantrout’s habits or arrangement, I’d say the final three-line stanza is a little nudge to the reader, saying, Notice! Earlier in the poem, I like they way the third stanza might be an aside about the poem, or might be a comment on the putative subject of the poem, or might be a general philosophical proposition. There’s no need to reduce one’s reading of the stanza to any single possibility. The rest of the poem radiates outward from there.

[The poem is from Armantrout's Veil: New & Selected Poems, published in 2001.]