Poet Rae Armantrout to read at Kenyon College

GAMBIER, Ohio (March 30, 2005) Poet Rae Armantrout will read from her work at 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 14, in Kenyon College's Peirce Hall Lounge.

Of all the poets who came to the fore during the 1970s and 80s as a result of the Language Poetry movement, Armantrout is one of the most accessible and also one of the most complex, giving readers a chance to enter the work and not be put off by its complexity. Her work has been described as multi-faceted and open to wildly different perceptions as it opens up language in the way that a can opener opens a can. The top cannot be put back on and there are many jagged edges to deal with.

Armantrout's most recent books are Up to Speed, The Pretext, and Veil: New and Selected Poems. Her poems have been included in numerous anthologies, including Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Language Meets the Lyric Tradition, The Great American Prose Poem: Poe to the Present and The Best American Poetry of 2004. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and San Francisco State University, she is professor of writing and American literature at the University of California, San Diego.

Sponsored by Kenyon's Department of English and the Richard L. Thomas Chair, Armantrout's reading is open to the public at no charge.