THE INVENTION OF HUNGER by Rae Armantrout (Tuumba #22)

Tuumba Press, 1979, First edition of 450 copies, Unpaginated, 5 3/4" X 9", Softcover Very good  By​ 1979, when Rae Armantrout published her second book, The Invention of Hunger, with Lyn Hejinian’s Tuumba Press, she was already what much of the literary world would soon learn to call a ‘language poet’. Like Hejinian, like their Bay Area friend and ally Ron Silliman, and like the writers from the East Coast who ran the magazine L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Armantrout sought a recalcitrant, even opaque, way of writing that could get out from under the assumptions, conventions and restrictions of (among other things) capitalism, patriarchy, Romantic lyric, transparent exposition and prose sense. Yet Armantrout did seem to make prose sense, in a spiky, laconic, take-it-or-leave-it way: ‘I make sense/like a scorpion,’ she later quipped. Her scepticism, her phrase by phrase resistance to habits and conventions, was neither an impulse to revolutionary chaos, nor the mechanical product of an ideology, but