Three Poems by Rae Armantrout

The Hole
A string of notes —

A string of words

could be a worm

or a needle

passing

in and out

through some hole —

stitching what to what?

I imagine myself

passing

among your thoughts,

a sleepwalker,

saying and doing things

I am ignorant of

as they occur.

View
Not the city lights. We want

­— the moon —

The Moon

none of our own doing!

Anti-Short Story
A girl is running. Don’t tell me

“She’s running for her bus.”

All that aside!

Rae Armantrout, who has been a professor of Writing and American Literature at UCSD for many years, was the recipient of both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Pulitzer Prize for her latest collection of poetry, Versed, published by Wesleyan University Press. The Pulitzer committee cited Versed as “a book striking for its wit and linguistic inventiveness, offering poems that are often little thought-bombs detonating in the mind long after the first reading.” The poems are reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. The author’s photo is by Rosanne Olson.