Finding Grace: Modernity and the Ineffable in the Poetry of Rae Armantrout and Fanny Howe

Abstract

When truth is deconstructed, how does this affect our concept of the person and the direction of thought? What happens to our relation with language or a community? This paper explores recent poetic investigations into the relation between the material world of the everyday and the ineffable. Taking as example, the analytic lyric of Rae Armantrout and Fanny Howe, it examines how their work may be read through the social and spiritual philosophies of Simone Weil. More specifically, it focuses on the role of gender in embodied thought, particularly in terms of sexuality, language, desire, motherhood, and violence.