Rae Armantrout, "And"

Grateful for Rae Armantrout's little poem "And." A few days ago I did yard work, let the sun thoroughly irradiate me, and poured out a considerable amount of sweat. When I went inside the house, I cleaned up. I knew I wanted to create something, demonstrate another form of curation. But I wasn't sure where to start. I flipped through the newspaper, tried some random books, and then dedicated myself to slowly reading some poems.

And then there was "And," a brief poem that is not subtle about inviting you into its space. You could imagine it as an exhibition you are walking through. With your best outfit on, you've arrived at some city's First Friday. Everyone's happy for one reason or another, everyone's looking for a public restroom, and you have entered a more contemporary art gallery. On the walls are the words "TENSE," "TENUOUS," and "TENDER" plastered in big colorful letters. They're spaced apart so you have to figure out how to connect them. Paintings and photos of sour grass flowers and yellow moths surround "TENDER," following you into the next room. In that room there's a giant sculpted sore thumb and another sculpture of a wall which seems to be breaking. Out of the latter, there is a transparent, frozen stream full of various fish and circus performers. The sore thumb is labelled "bogus," the broken wall and stream "spurious."

That's how I see the poem. Maybe you've got another idea about the world which spins out from it:

And (from Poetry)
Rae Armantrout
  
1

Tense and tenuous
grow from the same root

as does tender
in its several guises:

the sour grass flower;
the yellow moth.


2

I would not confuse
the bogus
with the spurious.

The bogus
is a sore thumb

while the spurious
pours forth

as fish and circuses.

Armantrout begins with a not-so-mundane point: Tense and tenuous / grow from the same root. To someone not presently anxious, this may seem obvious. But how many times does tension grow to uncontrollable heights while we have no idea what we are even worrying about? I certainly hate confronting what is "tenuous," generating tension. I have to admit that there are so many things I cannot control. That what few accomplishments I have are always in danger of collapsing or being washed away. That every little and not-so-little mistake will come to haunt me a hundredfold and the people who told me that anything I do is worthless will have ironic validation.

That things are tenuous can be a source of absolute, active misery. A misery which grows like the most annoying of weeds. And then, Armantrout adds to the picture: "as does tender / in its several guises: // the sour grass flower; / the yellow moth." Why do anxiety and the arbitrariness of it all have to make everything terrible? Tender has several guises; it shares a root with "tense" and "tenuous." Those lovely little yellow flowers, growing against all odds, don't boast of superiority or invincibility. They do not appear to be at war all the time. They're just there, along with a yellow moth flitting about. Tenderness transforms the contingency of all things as well as our understandable worry into a natural scene. The moth and the flowers appear to celebrate their survival without extraneous effort.

"And" does not end there, though. It continues with a meditation on the "bogus" and the "spurious," a meditation which looks completely disconnected from the first part. Armantrout warns: "I would not confuse / the bogus / with the spurious." What do various forms of falsity have to do with "the sour grass flower" or "the yellow moth?" And don't tenuousness, tension, and tenderness speak for themselves? The poem challenges us to connect the first and second parts, to be ourselves the "And" of the title.

"The bogus / is a sore thumb." Some fake things, some scams, result in harm we see and can deal with. This doesn't mean the harm is acceptable! People can see and deal with the injuries caused by war. The issue at this moment is our inner state, a state never far away from the root which made us tense, saw what is tenuous, and embraced what is tender. The "bogus," more or less, does not threaten the tenderness of the first part of the poem the same way as the "spurious."

The "spurious," weirdly enough, brings us to something like the demagoguery we confront today. An unchecked level of lying, of mountains of trash meant to drown us out if not simply drown us. "[T]he spurious / pours forth // as fish and circuses." Armantrout is so precise in so few words. The "spurious" "pours forth," like the miracle of bringing water from a stone. It promises that we can drink by telling us to go into the toughest desert. It "pours forth" like "fish and circuses," half the infamous "bread and circuses" which overthrew the Roman Republic and maintained the Empire. But also resembling the miracle of the fish and loaves, a moment where it is so clear we could feed each other if we really wanted to.

The vaguely Biblical guise of some of our worst demagoguery points to the way we lie to ourselves. The "spurious" isn't a sore thumb. It is what we want to accept. We want fake miracles instead of seriously thinking about what we can work with. Not every sore thumb, moment of tension, or critical circumstance can be eased tenderly. However, to get to what you can work with, you have to calm the panic and take the time to observe what is around you. The "spurious" blocks this; the precondition for acceptance of the lie has been fashioned by us. "And" pushes us to ask what else is there, beyond our reasonable or unreasonable complaints.