Hoo-Rae!

“New”

a poem by

Rae Armantrout

from the National Book Award Finalist:

UPDATE 3/17/10:
2009 National Book Critics Circle Award
and
UPDATE 4/12/10:
2010 PULITZER PRIZE Winner

Versed
(Wesleyan University Press, 2009)

(This year’s National Book Award for Poetry
will be announced Wednesday night, November 18th)

UPDATE 3/17/10:
Versed
is
the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award

UPDATE 4/12/10:
Versed
has been awarded
the 2010 PULITZER PRIZE for Poetry!]

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“New” happens to be the poem in Versed that these days I happen to like the most. Armantrout read the poem as part of a reading she gave this past Friday night at the de Young Museum, Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. What a pleasure, an invigorating pleasure, to hear Rae A. live!

Of all the poems I heard that night – and they were all great, with a number striking deep – “New” was the one that when I got back home, I just HAD to re-read right then. Which I did. Then did again. And then thought about it, and thought about it more, and then sat down to write about, which is to say, I thought about it even more, yet again.

Yes, “New,” as recited from the podium by Armantrout Friday night in her distinctive, strong, music-modulated voice, entered my head and STAYED there. And remains there still. Here is the poem:

New

If yellow
is the new black,

the new you
is a cartoon

spokesman
who blows his lines

around bumptious 3-D
Hondas,

apologizes often,
and remains cheerful.

*

The new pop song
is about getting real:

“You had a bad day.
The camera don’t lie.”

But they’re lying
to you
about the camera.

*

Since Fallujah
is the new Antigua,

sunlight nibbles
on pre-
charred

terrain
in the electric fireplace.

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This essay about “New” is a kind of close reading of the poem, but I admit up front that I can’t precisely parse it, even though it only has two dozen very short lines, divided into three sections. Much in it seems elusive or not explainable, at least by me. It’s a poem after all, an Armantrout poem at that, so explicative certainty probably isn’t a goal to seek. To quote her, from an interview included in her Collected Prose (Singing Horse Press, 2007):

. . . it’s all right to be unsure. There’s something powerful . . . in not being quite certain of what you’re seeing. Is there something in that shadow? This is often how we experience the world, why shouldn’t it be how we experience a poem?

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“New” hooks me right from the start. Its opening couplet, “If yellow / is the new black,” grabs hold, and hard. That’s largely because it’s in its essence a very familiar catch-phrase, arising from fashion marketing. Indeed, the phrase “the new black” has become so widespread that it has its own Wikipedia entry.

But Armantrout, while using the popular phrase and hooking me with it, gives it a twist: the conditional “[i]f” with which the poem begins. The “new black” here isn’t a declarative certainty as in the catch phrase, but the front end hypothesis of an asserted logical construct, linked to the assertion / conclusion of the lines that follow. “If X, then Y” is the classic formulation of this logical construct, and while Armantrout forgoes an explicit “then” the poem nonetheless reads here as if she did use that logic-link of a word. In short, the assertion of the first two lines set up the consequences discussed in the remainder of the section.

The lines that follow the speculative “[i]f yellow / is the new black” concern “the new you.” It’s not clear here who “you” is – it me (the person reading the poem), some unidentified entity being addressed in or by the poem, Armantrout herself or some part of her, or the collective world at large? Or all of the above?

Although the pronoun’s referent is indeterminate, the poem’s description of what “the new you” becomes isn’t mysterious at all, or, more precisely, provides plenty of clues: “a cartoon // [stanza-break pause] spokesman” who “blows his lines // around bumptious 3-D / Hondas // apologizes often, / and remains cheerful.”

This description of “the new you” may seem vaguely or even specifically familiar. You may have actually seen this character described in the poem, right in your home in fact, if you’ve happened in recent years to have watched TV during the periodic Honda dealer clearance sales. The TV advertisements for those close-out sales often feature “Mr. Opportunity,” an affable, company-created, yes, indeed, “cartoon spokesman.” Maybe you’ll recognize him:

Even if you don’t know this character, Armantrout’s description puts certain of his essential qualities right there on the page. That “the new you” would become this cartoon is odd, to say the least. The spokesman and his “bumptious” (love that word, with its denotation of pushy) 3-D cars have some of the fantasy of a dream and the kinetic charge of the surreal. But the overall feel, at least to me, is disquieting and almost grotesque. The spokeman’s profoundly unreal. Dude’s a cartoon, know what I mean? An over-simplified and exaggerated simulacrum of the real. As such, he’s very weird, in a concerning kind of way. I mean, take a look at Mr. Opportunity there. You don’t have to be coulrophobic for him to scare you a bit. So it’s also disturbing that this has become, in the logical construct of the poem’s first section, “the new you.”

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The poem’s second section begins with a statement about “the new pop song” that’s “about getting real.” “[G]etting real” seems a key here, obviously suggesting a concern with what’s actual, and what’s not, a matter which I suggested above is also implicit in the image of the cartoon spokesman.

The song “about getting real” is then invoked directly, in a couplet (set in quotation marks) taken right from the lyrics of an international mega-hit by Daniel Powter:

“You had a bad day.
The camera don’t lie.”

At its multi-year (circa 2005 - 2007) peak, “Bad Day,” the song from which these lyrics are taken, dominated pop radio and other pop culture venues (cf. American Idol, season five). The song is still heard in supermarkets, at sporting events, and the like. It’s one of those tunes where even if you don’t think you know it, you probably actually do. The cultural osmotic uptake processes are quite efficient and insidious that way.

But just in case you need a reminder, here’s the song and its lyrics, in a very basic presentation. The two lines used by Armantrout show up at about the 1:15 mark, the second time the phrase, “You had a bad day” is sung. Give it a listen, if you please:

“Bad Day”


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When Armantrout recites “New” out loud, she gives the two lyric-lines from the song in her poem a touch of Powter’s melody (click here, if you please, to hear her May 2007 recitation of the poem, as archived at PennSound). That hint of melody when the poem is read out loud is a nice touch, a very nice touch. It, along with the song’s actual words, effectively reminds the listener of the tune, and re-sets the song’s hook, a very, very effective hook, in the brain.

But after Armantrout sets that hook (and sorry dear readers, I’m metaphorically about to turn you into a fish), she gives the line(s) a mighty yank, a strong and surprising one, in the form of a direct challenge, spread over three short lines, to the lyric’s assertion that “The camera don’t lie.” Armantrout writes:

But they’re lying
to you
about the camera.

A direct statement, yes, but not perhaps not entirely pin-downable. As with the word “you” earlier in the poem (and here too), there’s another somewhat indeterminate pronoun in these lines: who are “they” that are doing the lying? More fundamentally, what exactly about the lyric’s “the camera don’t lie” are they lying about?

The latter question is perhaps easier to guess-answer. Armantrout’s statement, “they’re lying,” seems to directly imply that the camera in fact does lie, or maybe more accurately, can lie. That’s a concept with which anyone who’s taken a photo can understand, I think. How you frame the the shot determines what is seen, for starters. And what’s seen in the image is not just a function of where the lens is pointed, or when. Magnification, filters, and film speed can also vastly impact what’s seen. In other words, the camera is not an objective, never false machine, but something that produces images almost entirely based on the point of view of the person or group in control of it, who set the parameters concerning what will be focused on, and how that will be shown. The assertion that “the camera don’t lie” is entirely wrong, in the sense that the images it produces are not objective records, but the result of many subjective factors. The camera gives the picture the camera operator chooses to have seen.

Do you agree? Meanwhile, I can’t get “Bad Day” out of my head. ¡Que Lastima!

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The third and final section of “New,” as in the two that precede it, uses the title-word in the opening couplet. It also uses the “[something] is the new [something else]” construct with which the poem began. But this time, that construct is not conditional, but a statement of certainty (I’ve removed the comma from the end of the couplet’s second line):

Since Fallujah
is the new Antigua

These lines startle. There’s first the jolt of juxtaposition, both with what has come before and then the contrast between the place names in the lines themselves. With regard to what has come before, it is true that the lines about the cartoon spokesman and the pop song aren’t, as explained above, entirely innocuous. Still, it’s a shock when Armantrout (via the second word of the poem’s final section) takes us, and takes us quick, to the city whose very name reminds us – at least I hope it does – of some of the more singularly ugly (how inadequate a word) events of the Iraq war.

Fallujah. The death of almost twenty civilians after US troops fired into a crowd. “Blackwater Bridge.” Operation Phantom Fury with its incendiary white phosphorous. Various other reputed and/or reported massacres. Fallujah.

And then there is transformation of Fallujah into Antigua, a startling substantive assertion. How does Fallujah become Antigua? What is Armantrout saying?

The dynamics of the how the war-torn city became the idyllic Caribbean vacation destination are neither stated nor immediately apparent. It seems almost impossible to equate the two, and yet Armantrout, and I love her poetry for this, credits the reader with the ability to think and struggle with her words.

There is, I think, an unstated imaginative logic, a connotative hop-scotch, at play that connects Fallujah and Antigua in this poem. Specifically, I think Armantrout suggests here that the violence, death, and destruction of the Iraq war has become a kind of distant, easy, care-free vacationland. Or more precisely, that the war-horror may just as well have become that, for all the impact it has on us. This at least is how I read those lines.

How war has become a fanciful easy holiday is not said, but suggestions as to the process perhaps can perhaps be gleaned, or implied from, what Armantrout wrote in the previous sections of the poem. Maybe the phoniness of the commercial pitch, the falseness within pop culture, the way the camera lies, has something to do with it. Maybe all that has something to do with war-horror becoming a kind of picture postcard, untroubling kind of place, remote and unreal.

Armantrout concludes “New” with the corollary to the statement that Fallujah = Antigua, and it’s a most curious image, presented over five lines (not counting the double-space between the third and fourth lines of text):

sunlight nibbles
on pre-
charred

terrain
in the electric fireplace.

Within the image presented in these lines I “see” – in the words “charred // terrain” – land bombed or burnt in and around Fallujah; the destruction of war.

But the lines’ main image is the electric fireplace. That’s a device that I typically consider an abomination, a phony thing, maybe even an archetype of simulacra. The power, beauty, and naturalness of fire, in these fakes, are unconvincingly simulated, complete with a “pre- / charred” foreground. It can hardly get more unreal.

Against this faux-ness, at least here in Armantrout’s poem, even the marvel of sunlight, an archetype of the actual and true, can only “nibble.” That stops me. The sunlight doesn’t devour, or nuture, with its magnificent light and energy, but merely nibbles. The fake dominates the real.

This is a powerful, bleak image, and I think sharply reflects a part of what the three sections of the poem concern or remark upon: that which is manufactured, the real that is un-real. The “new” that is false, hyped, imposed, sloganeered, cartooned, sold, framed, distorted but presented as the real, and/or distanced from the actual, and fake or wrong to the core.

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So that’s some of what in “New” makes me read (or listen to it) over and over. Its concision, of course, is a part of the attraction here as well, the fact that it does so much in so few words. So too is the care with which it is written. I have the sense, given how its words, phrases, and sections fit together and echo or work off each other both substantively and linguistically, that much work went into the poem before it was considered finished. It’s a poem that rewards the kind of close attention I’ve tried to give it here.

It’s always something of an imposition, and perhaps almost a cliche, to ask readers to respond to what I’ve written. And yet me fascination with Armantrout’s “New” overcomes all hesitancy I’d otherwise have to make such a request. Please consider writing a comment here about the poem; I’d appreciate reading what you think about it, or any part of it. Thanks much for considering doing that, and in any event thanks much for giving this, and “New,” a read.

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Rae Armantrout

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