Abstract: Rae Armantrout is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet who, while often referred to as a founding member of the West Coast branch of Language Poetry, is also known as an early critic of some aspects of that movement. Her talk, “Poetic Silence” (1985), took a stand against the variety of prose poetry—called the New Sentence—that many of her peers were writing on the grounds that it tended toward an assertive, epigrammatic style that she characterizes as masculinist. She argues instead for a lineated, ruptured lyric that admits “silence.” This essay revisits “Poetic Silence” and reconstructs its intervention into the poetics of the Language group by reading it alongside the work of such contemporaries Ron Silliman and her own verse from the period. She invokes silence as a way to explain her efforts to interrupt the media barrage that overwhelms people's abilities to think and act independently and authentically. One cannot, she insists, achieve such silence once and for all; one must perpetually labor to attain and sustain it, from poem to poem and line to line.

Key words: Armantrout, American poetry, lyric poetry, avant-garde poetics, Language Poetry