Go Figure

What can we do when the future looks bleak? And could poetry really do anything about it? Rae Armantrout’s newest collection, Go Figure, poses these questions with open eyes and a wry smile. Ecological collapse and mass violence haunt Armantrout’s glimpses into everyday activities like blowing bubbles or admiring a blue hibiscus. As much as these poems invite us to think about the world through molecular physics, songs on the radio, and our expanding language for describing environmental disaster, these poems also ask, again and again, if we’re just blowing hot air.

A poem like “Simply” lays out the problem in simple terms, if only to illustrate how the answer isn’t so obvious:

Do I believe
that formulating
a problem
in the starkest
possible way
while making strange
and conspicuous
word choices
is helpful?

What if the answer
is no?

Armantrout’s hallmark short lines make ultra “conspicuous” the inutility and emptiness of problem-solving language, as though all of our problems could be solved with a well-written op-ed, impassioned debate, or clear and direct poem. The poem ends with a fragmentary nursery rhyme commanding a ladybug to fly home to its blazing house and children. Armantrout rarely answers the rhetorical questions that fill many of these poems, but it doesn’t take much to fill in the blanks.

Go Figure challenges us to defend poetry’s contemporary usefulness, though poets have been answering the ‘what is it good for?’ question for millennia. Armantrout’s cerebral intensity and cutting humor are stronger than ever and they frame each poem as an opportunity to contemplate our political moment without losing one’s wits. Like Socrates to his often-frustrated interlocutors, these poems offer a disquieting orientation to thinking abstractly, to acknowledging what we don’t know, to asking questions one can’t answer and probably doesn’t want answered. Armantrout slyly admits to poetry’s necessary purposelessness; once we accept the limits of language’s power, we can recognize what we might actually be able to do with it.

Many poems observe the natural world with Armantrout’s usual clarity and precision, but forest fires and mass die-offs have taken their toll. These poems trace the way nonstop violence and looming ecological collapse warp our perception of nature, and one can’t help but notice the signs even at a fantastical theme park:

The time came when the flags
flown over Enchanted Forest
and Camper Land
could never be raised
above half-mast
because mass murder
followed mass murder
so rapidly.

Armantrout proceeds to ask bluntly “Which kind of irony is this?”, as if the distinction would make a difference. These poems never mock tragedy but rather acknowledge the absurdity and irony of our society’s resignations to it, which show just how much needs to change even if you can’t think where to begin. As Armantrout asks:

If you aren’t telling kids
how to live

in a world
you can’t imagine

what are you doing?

One option is to talk about the “claret-colored leaves,” whether that rich color comes from seasonal change, flames, or blood splatter.

From one perspective, Go Figure is a collection about figuring things out. Poems with numbered sections collect observations, list possible reactions, and offer self-assurance for the future in the comfort of steady counting—1, then 2, then 3. Nonetheless, the title is an obviously sarcastic demand to take stock of the unaccountable. “Nothing recalls,” Armantrout tells us, “the new cat-6 / haboob”, i.e., the latest massive dust storm whose level of destruction requires a new designation.

These poems ask directly, obliquely, ironically, and even pleadingly whether some voices of poetry ought to be retired in the face of all this. “What was the point of warnings,” Armantrout asks, “when desiccation, inundation, / plague, extinction, and / the murder of children / were on constant display?” She doesn’t offer us jeremiads, nor a return to the romantic idea of self-rejuvenation through contemplating nature. She isn’t afraid of asking:

what good
is a metaphor

weighed down
with obscure reference

when what’s wanted
is the zing

of unimpeded
transmission?

Armantrout leaves open these probing questions like melodies looking for our participation to resolve. Some metaphors she is unwilling to make:

If you can make cancer
sound like clouds,
for instance—

white streaks on a film,
icy cirrus—

you may have the skill
to deal with Magellanic

die-offs.

“Magellanic” refers to a penguin species succumbing in unprecedented numbers to heat waves, but it also speaks to the world-spanning, “Magellanic” scale of ecological disaster—compared to poetry’s relatively small area of effect. Is this just poetic stalling? Of saying what not to do without suggesting an alternative? Regardless, Armantrout’s piquant wordplay and observations work to prevent us from growing numb or keeping our heads in the clouds.

Talking about these brief, well-wrought poems only glimpses their intellectual and aesthetic challenge. “I’m sick to death,” Armantrout reports, “of things that talk / about other things” // like there was no end to it.” She remains hyper-aware of how this all sounds and she doesn’t pretend to have the answers.