Graduating from the University of California, Berkeley in 1970, Armantrout later received a master's degree in creative writing at San Francisco State University in 1975. She was a member of the original West Coast Language group. Although Language poetry can be seen as advocating a poetics of nonreferentiality, Armantrout's work, focusing as it often does on the local and the domestic, resists such definitions. However, unlike most of the group, her work is firmly grounded in experience of the local and domestic worlds and she is widely regarded as the most lyrical of the Language Poets.

Her poems have appeared in many anthologies, including In The American Tree (National Poetry Foundation), Language Poetries (New Directions), A Norton Anthology, From the Other Side of the Century (Sun & Moon), Out of Everywhere (Reality Street), American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Language Meets the Lyric Tradition, (Wesleyan, 2002), The Oxford Book of American Poetry (Oxford, UP, 2006) and The Best American Poetry of 1988, 2001, 2002, 2004 and 2007.

Armantrout has twice received a Fund For Poetry Grant and was a California Arts Council Fellowship recipient in 1989. In 2007 she was awarded a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award. She is currently one of ten poets working on a project entitled The Grand Piano: An Experiment In Collective Autobiography. Writing on the volume began in 1998 and the first volume (of a proposed ten) was published in November 2006, and thereafter in three-month intervals.

Each year links to its corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:

• 1978: Extremities (The Figures)
• 1979: The Invention of Hunger (Tuumba)
• 1985: Precedence (Burning Deck)
• 1991: Necromance (Sun and Moon Press)
• 1991: Couverture (Les Cahiers de Royaumont) - a selected in French translation
• 1995: Made To Seem (Sun and Moon Press)
• 1998: writing the plot about sets (Chax)
• 2001: Veil: New and Selected Poems (Wesleyan University Press)
• 2001: The Pretext (Green Integer)
• 2004: Up to Speed (Wesleyan University Press)
• 2007: Next Life (Wesleyan University Press)
• 2009: Versed (Wesleyan University Press) - 2010 Pulitzer Prize - Poetry

• Narrativ [English-German, Bilingual edition, translated by Uda Strätling and Martin Göritz] (luxbooks, Wiesbaden 2009 ISBN 978-3-939557-40-1)

Prose

• True (Atelos, 1998) - memoir; republished in Collected Prose
• The Grand Piano: An Experiment In Collective Autobiography (with Bob Perelman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Carla Harryman, Tom Mandel, Ron Silliman, Kit Robinson, Lyn Hejinian, and Ted Pearson) (Mode A/This Press, 2007)
• Collected Prose (Singing Horse Press, 2007) - ISBN 0-935162-37-2

Further reading

• A Wild Salience: The Writing of Rae Armantrout (Burning Press, 2000; ISBN 1-5871-10253) ... featuring essays and poems on or inspired by her work including pieces by Robert Creeley, Susan Wheeler, Hank Lazer, Bob Perelman, Lydia Davis, Lyn Hejinian, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Ron Silliman, Brenda Hillman, Fanny Howe and others
• A Suite of Poetic Voices: "Interview" (with Manuel Brito), (Santa Brigada, Spain: Kadle Books, 1994)