I suppose that isn’t surprising.
Tumors are clever. I will save the rest of what I could say here for the next question.I took a journal with me into the hospital and made notes for poems while I was recovering from surgery, even though I was in pain and/or drugged much of that time. A native of California, she has taught writing at the University of California, San Diego as Professor of Poetry and Poetics for several decades.
The second part recounts a dream I had during the early months after surgery. But I think that perhaps, on some level, I knew there was something bad going on in my body and this knowledge manifested itself in my writing. Rae Armantrout has always taken pleasure in uncertainties and conundrums, the tricky nuances of language and feeling. Rae Armantrout examines not only life and work but also arguments we have with our selves and contradictions we contain.
I received the diagnosis when I was at least a third of the way through what turned out to be the book so, though people have described it as dealing with cancer, that isn’t entirely true.However, a number of the poems I wrote prior to learning about my disease have something ominous about them. I just hope your readers will take what they can from it.CancerRoadTrip is about making lemonade out of lemons.
A poet calls for a new kind of poetry criticism, and a new kind of critic. She explained, “you can hold the various elements of my poems in your mind at one time, but those elements may be hissing and spitting at one another.” According to critic “I think my poetry involves an equal counterweight of assertion and doubt,” Armantrout has written. A native of California, Rae is an American poet generally associated with the Language Poets. I was writing it because, well, that’s what I do. They can mask themselves from the immune system. She has published ten books of poetry and has also been featured in a number of major anthologies.I went to my doctor because I was growing a little mustache. Tracing the fight for equality and women’s rights through poetry. But spiritually and mentally, you can.… That was nice because I knew it wasn’t a movie he would have selected for himself.And my husband and I spent “quality time” together. In retrospect at least, I treasure the memory of that first year after surgery.The one called “Around” is in three parts. She said, “It doesn’t matter what it is because I’m going to get it.” And she did. She got the whole tumor with “clean margins’ (in cancer speak) -not counting the thin section she had sliced off, at my request, to send to the lab of an unorthodox oncologist named Dr. Nigourney.A friend had recommended him to me and I’d grabbed onto the shred of hope his method offered. Hosted by Al Filreis and featuring poets Charles Bernstein, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and Ron Silliman. The only really hopeful moment came when I met my surgeon, a woman named Carol Salem. The oncologist in my health care system said, reasonably enough, “If that worked, we would all do it.”Now that I am ten years out, I have the perspective to appreciate his point. Accept what is, let go of what was, and have faith in what will be. A bucket list trip: Africa! Well, I assumed it would be a lonely, frightening experience and it was. There are references to death and even specifically to cancer. And, at the time, I certainly wasn’t convinced I would . Is there a better metaphor?… But there was also something poignantly sweet about that time.When I was in the hospital, my son came down from Seattle where he was getting his PhD and we watched movies he picked out for me on his computer. Own it. At any rate, many of the poems, whether or not they refer to death directly, are written “in the valley of the shadow.” I’ve heard it said that the prospect of death, “concentrates the mind.”Hmm. I’m not at all certain that this is what enabled me to survive. Diagnosed with adrenal cortical cancer in 2006, many of her most recent pieces are driven by the struggle to accept and fight her illness. Armantrout's poems are often described as works of great restraint and care, their short lines packed with metaphors that carry multiple meanings. Rae Armantrout, one of the founding members of the West Coast group of Language poets, stands apart from other Language poets in her lyrical voice and her commitment to the interior and the domestic. Time went by, and, eventually, I started to be able to imagine I would have more years in my life.I am 10 years older now than I was then and have never had a recurrence.